Authors: Fabrizio Esposito, Mustafa Cavusoglu & Kamil Uludag
Arterial spin labeling (ASL) permits the estimation of brain perfusion using blood water as an endogenous tracer. The ASL plugins allows calculating relative and absolute (quantitative) cerebral blood flow (CBF) maps, as well as generating relative (rCBF) and absolue (aCBF) CBF-weighted image time-series, in BrainVoyager QX.
There are two ASL GUI plugins available, one operating on the original slice data ("ASLSlicePlugin") and one operating on resampled volume data ("ASLVolumePlugin"). Both plugins require raw ASL (control/tag) and calibration (M0) multi-slice time-series imported in BrainVoyager as standard FMR projects. The ASLSlicePlugin generates rCBF and aCBF as slice maps (MAP), whereas the ASLVolumePlugin generates both rCBF and aCBF maps as volume maps (VMP) and creates separate perfusion (dM) and BOLD (T2s) weighted time-series in two different volume time-course (VTC) data sets registered to the current VMR. It is possible to skip the ASLSlicePlugin and run the ASLVolumePlugin, provided that a VMR is available and the necessary 2D-3D registration between the ASL FMR and the VMR has been performed.
For all details about the theoretical background or the practical usage of the ASL plugins please click on one of the following links below: