Combination of data across different scanner platforms is a major concern for multisite studies. The quantitative nature of arterial spin labeling (ASL) is thought to be free from such concerns, but our results on data collected on the same scanner before and after hardware upgrade demonstrate that ASL is also subject to this confound. Normalization to a reference region greatly reduces variation even for non-quantitative data, and is a recommended approach for removing scanner-related variations.
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