Thomas
W. Okell1, Michael A. Chappell, 12, Peter Jezzard1
1FMRIB Centre, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom; 2Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Engineering, University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Vessel-encoded pseudocontinuous arterial spin labeling (VEPCASL) is typically used to generate artery-specific perfusion maps of three or four brain-feeding arteries. The ability to label a larger number of vessels may be useful for assessing flow patterns in smaller arteries, such as those supplying an arteriovenous malformation. Here we encode thirteen arteries (nine intracranial, four extracranial) above the circle of Willis in healthy volunteers using both dynamic angiographic and perfusion-weighted readouts. The Bayesian analysis method used successfully separates all vascular components. The resulting artery-specific images reveal blood flow patterns and hemodynamics within the vessels along with the resulting downstream perfusion.