Abstract #3518

Comparison of Non-Selective and Vessel-Encoded Pseudocontinuous Arterial Spin Labeling for Cerebral Blood Flow Quantification

Thomas W. Okell¹, Michael A. Chappell², 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

Quantification of cerebral blood flow (CBF) may be confounded in brain regions fed by multiple arteries with different transit delays, as may be the case in patients with significant collateral flow. Vessel-encoded pseudocontinuous arterial spin labeling (VEPCASL) generates artery specific perfusion maps, allowing the fitting of a kinetic model to each arterial component separately. Here we compare CBF quantification and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) using VEPCASL to conventional PCASL in healthy volunteers. Despite reduced SNR, the CBF estimates from VEPCASL were comparable to those from PCASL. Therefore VEPCASL may improve CBF quantification in cases of mixed blood supply.