Zungho Zun1, Eric C. Wong2, Krishna S. Nayak3
1Department of Electrical Engineering , University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; 2Departments of Radiology and Psychiatry, University of California, La Jolla, CA, USA; 3Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Current methods for myocardial ASL perfusion imaging suffer from a large spurious ASL signal in the ventricular blood pool, due to inadvertent tagging of blood in the LV and LA. This signal is 50-100x larger than the ASL signal in myocardium, and is a potential source of artifact, physiological noise, and MBF measurement error. We demonstrate the feasibility of pulsed tagging of the proximal aorta using a B1-insensitive 2D selective inversion pulse without disturbing the LA or LV. This scheme achieves a 67% inversion efficiency, and reduces the apparent ASL signal in the LV by 78%.