Weiying Dai1, Gopal Varma1, Rachel Scheidegger1, Ajit Shankaranarayanan2, Gottfried Schlaug3, David Alsop1
1Radiology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, United States; 2Global Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States; 3Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, United States
We report the measurement of resting physiologic fluctuations in volumetric arterial spin labeling (ASL) blood flow images of normal volunteers. When sufficient background suppression is employed, coherent spatial patterns of fluctuations consistent with resting state networks are the dominant contributor to structured noise. All 7 networks identified by independent component analysis (ICA) are consistent with the networks reported using blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI. ASL studies of resting state networks may be useful for characterization of temporal frequencies and regions of the brain poorly studied with BOLD. Better understanding of resting fluctuations may be necessary for accurate analysis of multi-scan ASL studies.
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