Abstract #3849

Quantification of Blood Oxygen-Level Dependent Signal Changes of Rat Brain by Using Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping

Meng-Chi Hsieh¹,², Jyh-Horng Chen¹,²

¹Institute of Biomedical Electronic and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; ²Interdisciplinary MRI/MRS Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

Functional MRI measures brain activity and relative blood flow using blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) contrast. However, the mechanism of BOLD contrast is caused by intrinsic susceptibility change. A recent MRI approach, referred to as quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM), has been proposed to have the potential to quantify the susceptibility within tissues, which may be also capable of improving the measurement of oxygenation-dependent susceptibility changes. To understand the relationship between tissue oxygenation and resulting susceptibility changes, in this study, we aimed to employ QSM technique on rats with different oxygenation levels and investigate the susceptibility changes within different regions of the brain.