Fast Analysis of Vessel Encoded ASL Perfusion & Angiographic Images

Michael A. Chappell^1,2, Tom W. Okell², Stephen J. Payne¹, Peter Jezzard², Mark W. Woolrich²

Vessel Encoded Arterial Spin Labelling (VEASL) preparations permit vessel selectivity for both dynamic angiographic and perfusion acquisitions. The calculation of flow contributions can be very sensitive to choice of encoding and subject position, this can be accounted for using a recently proposed general framework for VEASL analysis. However, the original implementation of this framework was too slow for many practical applications. Here faster solutions to the framework were sought that reduced computational time from hours to minutes or in some cases seconds without substantially affecting the accuracy of the resulting images.