Quantification of Cerebral Blood Volume Using Breath Hold in Rat

Seon Joo Kwon¹, Woo Hyun Shim¹, Bharat B. Biswal², Young Ro Kim¹

The typical CBV quantification strategy utilizes the systemic administration of MR contrast agents. In the current study, we propose to use breath hold (BH) and the associated tissue MRI signal changes to bypass the use of MR contrast agents and to enable the measurement repeatability. We compared the voxelwise CBV values acquired from the DSC (using Gd-DTPA) and BH methods in normal rat brains (n=6). The results from two techniques were significantly correlated, implicating that the BH technique can be used as a tool for quantifying CBV in replacement of traditional contrast agent methods.