Natural History of Patients Defined by Assessment of Cerebral Blood Flow Reserves

Abstract

Xenon has proven to be a useful tracer in the measurement of cerebral blood flow (CBF). While radioactive xenon has been extensively utilized for the measurement of CBF since the 1950s, the first reports of using stable xenon as a flow indicator appeared in 1977 (Haughton et al. 1976; Winkler et al. 1977). The following year, Kelcz et al. (1978) defined the blood-brain partition coefficient for xenon and Drayer et al. (1978) reported the first CBF measurements using the stable xenon technique. In 1983 General Electric, with other manufacturers following soon, incorporated this technique within a CT scanning system. In subsequent years, the xenon/CT (Xe/CT) technique has been validated as a quantitative CBF method in animal studies (Gur et al. 1985; Faturos et al. 1987; DeWitt et al. 1989; Wolfson et al. 1990; Yonas et al. 1988, 1990), and is currently used clinically in the diagnosis and management of patients with acute stroke (Drayer et al. 1980; Hughes et al. 1989; Yonas et al. 1989), occlusive vascular disorders (DeVries et al. 1990), vasospasm (Yonas et al. 1989; Yonas 1990), arteriovenous malformation (Okabe et al. 1983; Marks et al. 1988), and head trauma (Wozney et al. 1985; Darby et al. 1988; Marion et al. 1991) at over 40 institutions worldwide.