Accelerated Whole-Brain Mapping of Venous Cerebral Blood Volume Using Velocity-Selective Venous-Spin-Labeling With 3D GRASE Encoding

Motivation: The VS venous-spin-labeling-prepared 3D TSE method has recently shown promise in whole-brain venous CBV mapping with relative immunity to field variations. Nevertheless, the method’s relatively long scan times limits its application to functional studies involving short-term stimuli. We aimed to develop a highly accelerated technique for CBVv mapping across the entire brain. Goal(s): To reduce imaging time while mitigating inherent artifacts in GRASE imaging. Approach: We employed GRASE encoding with variable refocusing flip angles while subsampling k-space data, followed by compressed sensing based image reconstruction. Results: The proposed technique yields comparable CBVv values across the entire brain, with highly accelerated scan times. Impact: We introduce a scan-time efficient CBVv mapping strategy by means of GRASE encoding with sparse k-space sampling. Upon further evaluation of these issues, the present GRASE-based CBVv mapping method is expected to find various applications in neuroimaging studies.