Audrey Fan1, Praveen Gulaka1, Mohammad Mehdi Khalighi2, Bin Shen1, Aileen Hoehne1, Prachi Singh1, Jun H Park1, Dawn Holley1, Frederick T Chin1, and Greg Zaharchuk1
1Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States, 2Applied Science Lab, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States
The
ability to noninvasively image cerebral blood flow (CBF) would help with
assessment of many cerebrovascular disorders including stroke. We compared
simultaneous PET-MRI measurements of CBF by arterial spin labeling MRI and the
[15O]-water PET reference standard in healthy volunteers. ASL and
PET revealed similar spatial distributions of perfusion in the brain and
reliably detected CBF augmentation due to Diamox administration. ASL MRI also
demonstrated lower scan-rescan coefficient of variation across the gray matter
relative to PET. Going forward, we will perform kinetic modeling of absolute
CBF from [15O]-water PET and consider potentially different
radiotracer arterial input functions (derived from the PET-MRI images
themselves) that occur in different brain perfusion states.