Pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling (pCASL) has been applied for renal perfusion imaging, where inflowing blood is labeled in the descending aorta, just above the kidneys. However, in some cases when the labeling plane is positioned close to the lungs, significant decreases in SNR have been observed. We hypothesized that this was due to decreased labeling efficiency caused by the off-resonance effects near the lungs. In this study, an unbalanced pCASL gradient scheme that was optimized to be more robust to B0 inhomogeneities was compared with default implementations of pCASL at different labeling locations along the descending aorta.
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