Weiying Dai1,2, Philip M. Robson1,2, Ajit Shankaranarayanan3, David C. Alsop1,2
1Radiology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA; 2Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; 3Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, USA
The presence of intravascular signal can have undesirable effects on image quality and perfusion values with arterial spin labeling (ASL) techniques. Bipolar gradients have been employed to attenuate the flowing labeled spins within spin or gradient echo echoplanar images. However, the insertion of bipolar gradients can be difficult or impossible in multiple RF refocused imaging sequences such as FSE and balanced SSFP. As an alternative, we optimized and implemented a preparation sequence before the image acquisition to eliminate the fast flowing spins. This preparation can be flexibly combined with any image acquisition.