Mapping of Cerebral Blood Flow Directionality with Alternate Ascending/Descending Directional Navigation (ALADDIN)

Sung-Hong Park¹, Bumwoo Park¹, Jung-Hwan Kim¹, Tiejun Zhao², Kyongtae Ty Bae¹

Blood flow signals are commonly measured with arterial spin labeling (ASL) technique and represented in a scalar quantity. We tested the feasibility of mapping blood flow directionality in a vector and a tensor forms using a new ASL technique, alternate ascending/descending directional navigation. Blood flow directions mapped in the vector form was from brain center to lateral, anterior, and posterior and from feet to head. Although the directions of the primary eigenvector calculated from the tensor form were heterogeneous between regions, regional clusters of the same directionality were consistent across subjects. Further studies are necessary to validate the new measurement.