Yuji Shen1, Ida Mengyi Pu2, Risto A. Kauppinen3
1School of Medicine, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK; 2Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK; 3Biomedical NMR Research Center, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH 03755, USA
It is feasible to use MRI for quantification of blood oxygen saturation (Y) and oxygen extraction fraction (OEF) in vivo from transverse relaxation data. In this study we used grey matter nulled (GMN) and vascular space occupancy (VASO) fMRI techniques to measure T2* in brain parenchyma at baseline and during visual stimulation at 3T. The change in T2* obtained by GMN fMRI was 1.80.8 ms, which was much greater than that detected by VASO fMRI (0.60.3 ms). The venous oxygen saturation (Yv) during activation and OEF derived from VASO data were found to be 0.770.02 and 0.220.02, respectively.