A Radial 3D GRE-EPI Pulse Sequence with kz Blip Encoding for Whole-Brain Isotropic 3D Perfusion Using DSC-MRI Bolus Tracking with Sliding Window Reconstruction (3D RAZIR)

Sumeeth Vijay Jonathan¹, Parmede Vakil¹, Yong Jeong¹, Sameer A. Ansari², Michael Hurley², Bernard R. Bendok³, Timothy J. Carroll¹, ²

3D RAZIR obtains 76-slice whole-brain relative perfusion measurements with DSC-MRI bolus tracking at 1.7 mm³ isotropic voxel resolution. Consecutive 3D volumes are acquired in 10.3 s, but we recover dynamic bolus information at 160 ms per frame using sliding window reconstruction. 3D RAZIR uses in-plane radial sampling and through-plane Cartesian sampling with 3D GRE-EPI readouts to allow sliding window reconstruction, which permits increased volume coverage without sacrificing SNR for bolus tracking. Radial view-dependent N/2 ghosting artifacts are corrected using inline phase correction scans. 3D RAZIR obtains whole-brain perfusion maps of rCBF, rCBV, and MTT with good reference standard agreement.