Vessel-specific quantification of cerebral venous oxygenation with velocity encoding preparation and rapid acquisition

Motivation: Non-invasive measurement of cerebral venous oxygenation (Yv) is of critical importance in numerous brain diseases. Goal(s): The present work proposed a fast method to quantify regional Yv map for both large and small veins, named T2-Relaxation-Under-Velocity-Encoding-and-Rapid Acquisition (TRU-VERA). Approach: It isolates blood spins from static tissue with velocity-encoding preparation, modulates the T2 weighting of venous signal with T2-preparation and utilizes a bSSFP readout to achieve fast acquisition with high resolution. Results: Venous T2 measured with TRU-VERA was highly correlated with T2 from TRUST and showed an excellent test-retest reproducibility with a CoV of 1.2% for large veins and 3.6% for small veins. Impact: The proposed TRU-VERA sequence is a promising method to for non-contrast and fast assessment of vessel-specific oxygenation, thus regional cerebral oxygen metabolism, in a number of diseases.