Magnetization Transfer Enhanced Vascular-Space-Occupancy (MT-VASO) MRI with Whole Brain Coverage

Jun Hua¹, Domenico Zaca¹, Samson Jarso¹, Jay J. Pillai¹, Peter C.M. van Zijl¹

Vascular-space-occupancy (VASO) MRI is an inversion-recovery based method that employs tissue signal changes during blood nulling to image blood volume changes. By adding an MT pulse before the VASO inversion pulse, the recovery process of tissue can be accelerated, which leads to increased tissue SNR. Recent work showed that gradient-spin-echo (GraSE) imaging may be a better choice for VASO-MRI than the conventional EPI. We combined the MT-VASO technique with 3D-GraSE sequence to extend it from single-slice to whole-brain coverage. Compared to the commonly used 2D multi-slice EPI-VASO approach, this new whole-brain VASO sequence drastically improved SNR/CNR by 60-150%.