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Updated: Jun 27, 2025
Author Spotlight: Noninvasive Cerebral Blood Flow Determination in Human Functional Brain Region for Diagnosis of Neurological Disorders
Published on: May 31, 2024
Estimation of Cerebral Blood Flow Using the Pulse Wave Amplitude in Brain MRI
Julian Glandorf1, Filip Klimeš1, Agilo Luitger Kern1
1Institute for Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany; Biomedical Research in End-stage and Obstructive Lung Disease Hannover (BREATH), Member of the German Centre for Lung Research (DZL), Hannover, Germany.
Rationale And Objectives:
First, to test the feasibility of cerebral blood flow (CBF) estimation using the pulse wave amplitude in flow-related enhancement (FREE) brain MRI in comparison to pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling (pCASL-MRI). Second, the potential for acceleration was evaluated retrospectively.
Materials And Methods:
24 healthy study participants between 20 and 61 years had cerebral MRI. Perfusion imaging was performed with a balanced steady-state free precession sequence for FREE-MRI and with pCASL-MRI for comparison.
Results:
The value distribution of the estimated CBF showed a high overlap in the histogram between 0 and 20 mL/100 g/min. However, disparity of the values occurred with more values between 20 and 60 mL/100 g/min using pCASL-MRI and more high values > 60 mL/100 g/min applying FREE-MRI. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test confirmed a differing probability distribution (P = 0.62). The approximated CBF from FREE-MRI remained stable until only 50% of the acquired data was used. Values from using 40% of the data increased significantly compared to 90% or more (P ≤ 0.05). Values within the white matter presented no significant change after data reduction. The global and voxel-wise correlation coefficients towards pCASL-MRI presented stability during data reduction of FREE-MRI.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, the proposed technique allows a rough approximation of the CBF compared to pCASL-MRI. Further sequence optimization must be achieved to improve the measurement of relatively lowly perfused tissues. Nevertheless, it offers large potential for imaging speed optimization and enables perfusion-weighted images similarly to the color Doppler mode in ultrasound.
