Jack A. Wells1,2, Mark F. Lythgoe2,3, David Gadian2, Roger Ordidge1, David L. Thomas1
1Advanced MRI Group, University College London, London, UK; 2RCS Unit of Biophysics, UCL Institute of Child Health, London, UK; 3Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging, University College London, London, UK
Recently, Hadamard encoding techniques have been applied to the CASL labelling pulse to efficiently image small boli of tagged arterial blood water at a range of post-labelling delay times. In this study we demonstrate that this method can be successfully applied in-vivo to accurately measure cerebral blood flow and arterial transit time (a) in the rat brain. We have modified the ASL quantification model to take account of the new encoding approach that can measure the first inflow of labeled blood into the tissue. We demonstrate an improvement in the precision of the a estimates compared to the standard method.
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