Blurring-free 3D perfusion and arterial blood T2 mapping using partition encoding reordered GRASE (PER-GRASE) ASL at 5T

Motivation: The blurring along the slice direction using traditional 3D GRASE ASL acquisition and its reduced SNR efficiency for measuring arterial blood T2 presents notable challenges. Goal(s): To simultaneously acquire blurring-free ASL maps and arterial blood T2 mapping at 5T. Approach: In our method, we reordered k-space partition acquisition across TRs, achieving fully sampled k-space at each echo time after recombination. Mono/bi-exponential models were used for calculating the T2 values of blood, gray matter, and white matter. Results: The proposed technique provides full-brain blurring-free perfusion and T2 mapping. Arterial blood increased at longer PLD, suggesting a potential peri-capillary compartment between capillary and tissue space. Impact: We proposed a PER-GRASE ASL technique for blurring-free perfusion and arterial blood T2 mapping with full-brain coverage at 5T, which has the potential to be adapted for measuring neurovascular function such as brain oxygenation and BBB function in clinical studies.