Hesamoddin Jahanian1, 2, Scott Peltier1, 2, Douglas C. Noll1, 2, Luis Hernandez-Garcia1, 2
1Functional MRI Laboratory, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States; 2Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States
Functional magnetic resonance imaging using physiological parameters such as cerebral blood perfusion or cerebral blood volume (CBV), unlike BOLD fMRI, provides a quantifiable contrast and is also more closely related to neural activity. Current Perfusion-based fMRI techniques, however, suffer from poor sensitivity and low temporal resolution. It has recently been shown that the change in CBV during neural activation mainly originates from arterial rather than venous blood volume, but CBV-based fMRI methods (such as VASO and MOTIVE) are also limited by their low signal to noise ratio. We propose a novel method based on pseudocontinuous arterial spin labeling (pCASL) technique to achieve a contrast that depends on arterial cerebral blood volume (CBVa) and can be used for functional imaging experiments. The method proposed here offers sensitivity to brain activation that is on par with BOLD imaging and superior to perfusion ASL, while maintaining most of the advantages of perfusion ASL imaging.