Abstract
Purpose: Velocity-selective saturation (VSS) pulse trains provide a viable alternative to the spatially selective methods for measuring cerebral blood volume (CBV) by reducing the sensitivity to arterial transit time. This study is to compare the Fourier-transform–based velocity-selective saturation (FT-VSS) pulse trains with the conventional flow-dephasing VSS techniques for CBV quantification. Methods: The proposed FT-VSS label and control modules were compared with VSS pulse trains utilizing double refocused hyperbolic tangent (DRHT) and 8-segment B1-insensitive rotation (BIR-8). This was done using both numerical simulations and phantom studies to evaluate their sensitivities to gradient imperfections such as eddy currents. DRHT, BIR-8, and FT-VSS prepared CBV mapping was further compared for velocity-encoding gradients along 3 orthogonal directions in healthy subjects at 3T. Results: The phantom studies exhibited more consistent immunity to gradient imperfections for the utilized FT-VSS pulse trains. Compared to DRHT and BIR-8, FT-VSS delivered more robust CBV results across the 3 VS encoding directions with significantly reduced artifacts along the superior-inferior direction and improved temporal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values. Average CBV values obtained from FT-VSS based sequences were 5.3 mL/100 g for gray matter and 2.3 mL/100 g for white matter, comparable to literature expectations. Conclusion: Absolute CBV quantification utilizing advanced FT-VSS pulse trains had several advantages over the existing approaches using flow-dephasing VSS modules. A greater immunity to gradient imperfections and the concurrent tissue background suppression of FT-VSS pulse trains enabled more robust CBV measurements and higher SNR than the conventional VSS pulse trains.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 3544-3554 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Magnetic Resonance in Medicine |
Volume | 81 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2019 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
Keywords
- Fourier-transform–based velocity-selective saturation
- arterial spin labeling
- cerebral blood volume
- eddy current
- velocity-selective pulse train