Andre van der Kouwe1, Matthew Dylan Tisdall1,
Oliver Hinds1, Aaron Hess2, David Salat1,
Douglas Greve1
1Radiology, Massachusetts General
Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States; 2Biomedical Engineering,
University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
A
rapid single slice EPI acquisition (neck blood flow navigator) is interleaved
between slices of a conventional multislice 2D BOLD EPI acquisition in a
single sequence that provides information with high temporal resolution
describing blood flow in the major arteries of the neck. This signal is
tightly coupled to blood flow in the brain and may be used to assess and
correct for physiologic noise in the BOLD signal. Navigator images are
reconstructed in real-time during acquisition and it is shown that the timing
of the cardiac signal derived from the navigators closely matches the timing
of the photoplethysmograph.