Abstract
Object
The objective of this study was to investigate effects of varying readout bandwidths on the arterial spin labeling (ASL)-perfusion MRI measurements at a high magnetic field MRI system.
Materials and methods
Brain perfusion studies were performed on nine volunteers (four males, five females) using flow sensitive alternating inversion recovery (FAIR) ASL single-shot echo-planar imaging (EPI)-MRI. To investigate EPI bandwidth effects on the time-series perfusion-weighted imaging (PWI) data, two regions-of-interest (ROI) were placed outside the brain to determine the level of noise and another ROI inside the brain to determine the level of signal. Coefficients of variations (CoV) were calculated for the time-series PWI data. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to investigate voxel-wise differences in the time-series PWI data between two different bandwidth values.
Results
At the level of ROI, there was no significant effect of changing EPI bandwidths on the time-series PWI data in any of the volunteers (P > 0.031). In contrast, CoV values over the dynamic PWI data varied with depending on selecting EPI bandwidths and voxel-based tests showed that N2 ghosting, modulated by EPI bandwidth, can appear in some brain regions, especially in areas that overlap with the spatial distribution of N2 ghosting artifacts.
Conclusions
Although N2 ghosting can be reduced by adjusting the bandwidth of EPI on the time-series of PWI data, the effects cannot be entirely eliminated. In particular, N2 ghosting can bias CBF quantification if EPI control scans to determine the equilibrium-state signal are confounded by N2 ghosting. Therefore, careful tuning of the bandwidth of EPI is necessary to avoid artifacts in the ASL signal from N2-ghosting.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Miss Sun-Hee Lee for technical assistance and also thank Dr. Jiongjiong Wang at the Department of Radiology of University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia for providing the FAIR-ASL sequence. The authors are grateful to Dr. Michael W. Weiner at the Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Disease of University of California-San Francisco for invaluable support for this work. This research was supported by the Kyung Hee University Research Fund in 2006 (KHU-20061234).
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Jahng, GH., Schuff, N. Influence of selecting EPI readout-encoding bandwidths on arterial spin labeling perfusion MRI. Magn Reson Mater Phy 22, 287–295 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10334-009-0174-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10334-009-0174-2