Abstract #3430

Fernandez-Seara M, Wang J, Detre J

Continuous arterial spin labeling techniques use flow driven adiabatic inversion of blood water proton spins to image perfusion. Arterial blood velocity changes over the cardiac cycle can have a significant effect on the degree of inversion. In this work, we have performed simulations and experiments to study the effect of two parameters, TR and labeling time, on efficiency variability and as a result on the SNR of CASL perfusion time series. We have demonstrated that temporal SNR can be increased by increasing the duration of the labeling pulse to cover two or more cardiac cycles.