Continuous Arterial Spin Labeling by a Separate Neck Coil with Inversion-Recovery Suppression of Static Tissue Signals (Ir-CASL)

Qiang Shen¹, Timothy Q. Duong¹

Reduction or elimination of the static tissue signal in an ASL study could improve sensitivity and reproducibility. Such static tissue signal reduction has been achieved with the use of additional inversion pulses during the labeling of arterial spins in single-coil ASL techniques. In this work, we implemented the inversion-recovery suppression of static tissue to the two-coil continuous ASL (ir-cASL) to image baseline CBF and stimulus-evoked CBF fMRI. This approach compares favorably with existing methods because static tissue suppression is independent of labeling efficiency.