Tracey Anne Baskerville1, Christopher McCabe1,
Jim Patterson2, Juan Chavez3, I Mhairi Macrae1,
William M. Holmes1
1Glasgow Experimental MRI Centre,
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, United Kingdom; 2Institute
of Neurological Sciences, Southern General Hospital, Glasgow, United Kingdom;
3Discovery Translational Medicine, Wyeth Research, Collegeville,
PA, United States
Arterial
spin labelling (ASL) has provided some valuable insight into cerebral
perfusion in stroke research. ASL has
the advantages of being non-invasive, allows repeated scanning in the same
subject and can generate fully quantitative cerebral blood flow (CBF)
measurements; however it requires further validation in rodent stroke
models. We modified a published ASL
technique (Moffat et al, 2005) and validated it against an established
autoradiographic technique using the SPECT ligand, 99mTC-D,
L-Hexamethylpropyleneamine (99mTc-HMPAO) in a rodent stroke model. We found that relative CBF estimates in
cerebral regions of interest generated from ASL and autoradiography were closely
matched throught MCA territory and ASL was able to accurately detect
reductions in CBF in ischaemic tissue.