Multicenter Reproducibility of Continuous, Pulsed and Pseudo-Continuous Arterial Spin Labeling; Can We Use General Reference Values of Cerebral Blood Flow?

Sanna Gevers¹, Matthias J.P. van Osch², Jeroen Hendrikse³, Reinoud P.H. Bokkers³, Dennis A. Kies², Wouter M. Teeuwisse², C.B. Majoie¹, Aart J. Nederveen¹

Arterial spin labeling (ASL) is a non-invasive imaging technique that can be used to measure cerebral perfusion in the diagnosis and evaluation of brain disease. However, the complicated set up of ASL experiments raises the question whether comparable perfusion images would be obtained when scanning the same subject at different imaging sites and whether multicenter reproducibility of ASL allows the use of general reference values of cerebral blood flow. To answer these questions we assessed intra- and multicenter reproducibility of continuous, pseudo-continuous and pulsed ASL in a group of 6 healthy volunteers scanned twice at multiple sites.