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

Sung-Hong Park¹, Jeffrey W. Barker¹, ², Kyongtae Ty Bae¹

ALADDIN is a new imaging technique that enables us to perform interslice perfusion-weighted (PW) imaging with no separate preparation pulse. In this article, we investigated the feasibility of quantitative mapping of blood perfusion with ALADDIN at various flip angles. Sensitivity of PW signals kept increasing with flip angle. Centric phase-encode order provided twice higher sensitivity than linear phase-encode order. These experimental results agreed with the simulation results. Cerebral blood flow measured with ALADDIN was close to the values from pulsed arterial spin labeling. The current study helps us to optimize and quantitatively map ALADDIN PW signals.