Arterial Spin Labelling
Cerebral blood flow (CBF) in the unit of mL/100g/min (milliliters of blood/100 grams of tissue/minute) is an important physiological parameter to evaluate the brain perfusion. Among all the imaging methods for measuring CBF, arterial spin labelling (ASL) is a MRI method which uses magnetic labeled water in the arterial as a flow tracer. The concept of ASL is to magnetically label spins from the arterial blood by pulsed inversion in a tagged image and subtract it from the control image that has no spin labelling. Comparing to other imaging methods, ASL has the advantages of non-contrast agent, non-radiation, low cost and repeatable measuring. Currently, two classes of ASL methods: pulsed ASL (PASL) and pseudo-Continuous ASL (pCASL) are available in our group. They have been widely applied in MR-PET for the diseases studies such as cerebral gliomas and other functional studies.
