Abstract #2172

Cerebral Blood Flow Quantification from QUASAR ASL by Stable Spline

Marco Castellaro¹, Amit Mehndiratta², Denis Peruzzo¹, Gianluigi Pillonetto¹, Esben Thade Petersen³, Xavier Golay⁴, Michael A. Chappell², Alessandra Bertoldo¹

¹Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Padova, PD, Italy; ²Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; ³Departments of Radiology and Radiotherapy, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands; ⁴University College London, London, United Kingdom

QUASAR ASL allows the simultaneous estimation of Cerebral Blood Flow (CBF) and the residue function using deconvolution techniques. One vital aspect of quantification process is the estimation of delay between arterial input function and tissue. The error in delay might be propagated to CBF estimation. In this study the performance of a novel deconvolution method, Stable Spline (SS) was compared with the most commonly used method (oSVD) both on simulated and clinical data. SS showed a reliable estimation of delay, CBF along with physiologically realistic residue function compared to oSVD.