Abstract #0015

Quantitative Cerebral Blood Flow Changes in Huntington's Disease Measured Using Pulsed Arterial Spin Labeling

J. Jean Chen¹, David H. Salat¹, H. Diana Rosas,¹²

¹A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, United States; ²Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States

Huntington's disease (HD) has been associated with wide-spread cortical and subcortical grey matter atrophy, in which the role of cerebral blood flow (CBF) abnormalities is potentially significant. However, low spatial resolution erodes the ability of conventional techniques to reveal spatially-specific CBF changes. In this work, we present, for the first time, HD-related quantitative CBF changes measured using pulsed arterial-spin labelling (PASL). Regressing out the effect of cortical thinning, our results still show significant underlying CBF reduction across the cortex. CBF also decreased in the striatum and hippocampus. CBF reduction patterns were found to be partially independent of structural atrophy.