Benefits of Spiral Imaging for Arterial Spin Labeling as Compared to EPI

Britta Lehmann¹, Tiejun Zhao², Josef Pfeuffer¹

The most common imaging methods for PASL are EPI and spiral imaging. Segmenting the spiral trajectory into two interleaved spirals reduces the duration of each spiral and therefore blurring by off resonance effects. In this work, an approach with a one and a two-segmented spiral in comparison to full and partial k-space EPI were evaluated in terms of SNR and the impact of artifacts (off resonance, physiology) of the ASL signal. PICORE-PASL data from subjects were acquired in human subject at 3T. In conclusion, the two-segmented spiral method provided the bests result with regard to artifacts and SNR for PASL.