Modified pulsed continuous arterial spin labeling for labeling of a single artery

Imaging the contribution of different arterial vessels to the blood supply of the brain can potentially guide the treatment of vascular disease and other disorders. Previously available only with catheter angiography, vessel-selective labeling of arteries has now been demonstrated with pulsed and continuous arterial spin labeling methods. Pulsed continuous labeling, which permits continuous labeling on standard scanner radiofrequency hardware, has been used to encode the contribution of different vessels to the blood supply of the brain. Vessel encoding requires a longer scan and a more complex reconstruction algorithm and may be more sensitive to fluctuations in flow, however. Here a method is presented for single-artery selective labeling, in which a disk around the targeted vessel is labeled. Based on pulsed continuous labeling, this method is achieved by rotating the directions of added in-plane gradients. Numerical simulations of the simplest strategy show good efficiency but poor suppression of labeling at large distances from the target vessel. Amplitude modulation of the rotating in-plane gradients results in better suppression of distant vessels. In vivo results demonstrate highly selective labeling of individual vessels and a rapid falloff of the labeling with distance from the center of the labeling disk, in agreement with the simulations.