Perfusion- and BOLD-based fMRI in the study of a human pathological model for task-related flow reductions

In the present work, an arteriovenous malformation was taken as a pathological model for studying task-related flow decreases during a motor task. Combined Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD)-perfusion experiments were applied in order to evaluate the relative sensitivity of these techniques to task-related reductions in cerebral blood flow (CBF). Results shows that, by matching the sensitivity of the methods (which exhibit a different contrast-to-noise ratio) in the primary motor cortex, the spatial extent of the regions of decreased perfusion signal is larger than those of the BOLD signal reduction. The above finding suggests that perfusion imaging, that already represents a gold standard method in the detection of vascular phenomena, may estimate task-related flow decreases in a functional time-series better than BOLD.