Abstract #0295

Mapping Cerebral Blood Flow Territories using Harmonic Encoding Pseudocontinuous Arterial Spin Labeling, Fuzzy Clustering & Independent Component Analysis

Wen-Chau Wu^1,2

¹Graduate Institute of Oncology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; ²Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

Vessel-encoded pseudocontinuous arterial spin labeling (VEPCASL) is a novel MRI technique with capability of differentiating flow territories of the primary arteries passing through a predefined tagging plane. We implemented VEPCASL with harmonic encoding to expand feature dimension and employed ICA and FCM clustering for territory separation. Results have shown that ICA and FCM substantially improve the robustness of K-means clustering. Feature dimension can be efficiently expanded using harmonic encoding, especially along the direction where vascular branches are more complex. FCM may depict the borderline of two or more flow territories and provide useful information for clinical evaluation of watershed infarction.