Quantitative cerebral blood flow in dynamic susceptibility contrast MRI using total cerebral flow from phase contrast magnetic resonance angiography

David Bonekamp, Mahaveer Degaonkar, Peter B. Barker
2011 Magnetic Resonance in Medicine  
Dynamic susceptibility contrast magnetic resonance imaging (DSC-MRI) during bolus injection of gadolinium (Gd) contrast agent is commonly used to investigate cerebral hemodynamics. The large majority of clinical applications of DSC-MRI to date have reported relative CBF values due to dependence of the result on the accuracy of determining the arterial input function (AIF), the robustness of the singular value decomposition (SVD) algorithm, and others. We propose a calibration approach that
more » ... tly measures the total (i.e. whole brain) cerebral blood flow (tCBF) in individual subjects using phase-contrast (PC) magnetic resonance angiography (MRA). The method was applied to data from 11 patients with intracranial pathology. The sum of squares variance about the mean (uncorrected: white matter =105.6, gray matter=472.2; corrected: white matter=34.1, gray matter=99.8) after correction was significantly lower for white matter (p=0.045) and for gray matter (p= 0.011). The mean gray and white matter CBF in the contralateral hemisphere were not significantly altered by the correction, however. The proposed PC-MRA calibration technique appears to be one of the most direct correction schemes available for DSC-MRI CBF values and can be performed rapidly, requiring only a few minutes additional scan time.
doi:10.1002/mrm.22776 pmid:21287594 pmcid:PMC3140063 fatcat:qoxnf7bmyfbl5ozeehqn26y5ru