Kenneth K. Kwong1, Timothy G. Reese1,
Koen Nelissen1, Ona Wu2, Suk-Tak Chan1,
Benner Thomas1, Joseph B. Mandeville1, Mary Foley1,
Wim Vanduffel1, David A. Chesler1
1MGH/MIT/HMS Athinoula A. Martinos
Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown,
MA, United States; 2MGH/MIT/HMS Athinoula A. Martinos Center for
Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital,, Charlestown, MA, United
States
We
investigated the feasibility of making relative cerebral blood flow (rCBF)
maps from MR images acquired with short TR by measuring the initial rate of
Gd-DTPA arriving within a time window smaller than the tissue mean transit
time τ. We named this rCBF
measurement technique utilizing the early data points of the bolus the early
time points method (ET). ET offered
rCBF results of reasonable gray-white flow contrast. Better brain coverage
for ET can be obtained by applying the SIR-EPI technique. Attention was paid to the noise problem
around the time of arrival (TOA) of the contrast agent.
Keywords