A flow-diffusion model of oxygen transport for quantitative mapping of cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen (CMRO2) with single gas calibrated fMRI

Oxygen extraction fraction mapping based combining quantitative susceptibility mapping and quantitative blood oxygenation level-dependent imaging model using multi-delay PCASL

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

The oxygen extraction fraction is an essential biomarker for the assessment of brain metabolism. A recently proposed method combined with quantitative susceptibility mapping and quantitative blood oxygen level-dependent magnitude enables noninvasive mapping of the oxygen extraction fraction. Our study investigated the oxygen extraction fraction mapping variations of single-delay and multi-delay arterial spin-labeling.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A total of twenty healthy participants were enrolled. The multi-echo spoiled gradient-echo, multi-delay arterial spin-labeling, and magnetization-prepared rapid gradient echo sequences were acquired at 3.0 T. The mean oxygen extraction fraction was generated under a single delay time of 1780 ms, multi-delay arterial spin-labeling of transit-corrected cerebral blood flow, and multi-delay arterial spin-labeling of arterial cerebral blood volume. The results were compared via paired t tests and the Wilcoxon test. Linear regression analyses were used to investigate the relationships among the oxygen extraction fraction, cerebral blood flow, and venous cerebral blood volume.

RESULTS

The oxygen extraction fraction estimate with multi-delay arterial spin-labeling yielded a significantly lower value than that with single-delay arterial spin-labeling. The average values for the whole brain under single-delay arterial spin-labeling, multi-delay arterial spin-labeling of transit-corrected cerebral blood flow, and multi-delay arterial spin-labeling of arterial cerebral blood volume were 41.5 ± 1.7 % (P < 0.05), 41.3 ± 1.9 % (P < 0.001), and 40.9 ± 1.9 % (N = 20), respectively. The oxygen extraction fraction also showed a significant inverse correlation with the venous cerebral blood volume under steady-state conditions when multi-delay arterial spin-labeling was used (r = 0.5834, p = 0.0069).

CONCLUSION

These findings suggest that the oxygen extraction fraction is significantly impacted by the arterial spin-labeling methods used in the quantitative susceptibility mapping plus the quantitative blood oxygen level-dependent model, indicating that the differences should be accounted for when employing oxygen extraction fraction mapping based on this model in diseases.

Breath-hold BOLD fMRI without CO2 sampling enables estimation of venous cerebral blood volume: potential use in normalization of stimulus-evoked BOLD fMRI data

BOLD fMRI signal has been used in conjunction with vasodilatory stimulation as a marker of cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR): the relative change in cerebral blood flow (CBF) arising from a unit change in the vasodilatory stimulus. Using numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the variability in the relative BOLD signal change induced by vasodilation is strongly influenced by the variability in deoxyhemoglobin-containing cerebral blood volume (CBV), as this source of variability is likely to be more prominent than that of CVR. It may, therefore, be more appropriate to describe the relative BOLD signal change induced by an isometabolic vasodilation as a proxy of deoxygenated CBV (CBVdHb) rather than CVR. With this in mind, a new method was implemented to map a marker of CBVdHb, termed BOLD-CBV, based on the normalization of voxel-wise BOLD signal variation by an estimate of the intravascular venous BOLD signal from voxels filled with venous blood. The intravascular venous BOLD signal variation, recorded during repeated breath-holding, was extracted from the superior sagittal sinus in a cohort of 27 healthy volunteers and used as a regressor across the whole brain, yielding maps of BOLD-CBV. In the same cohort, we demonstrated the potential use of BOLD-CBV for the normalization of stimulus-evoked BOLD fMRI by comparing group-level BOLD fMRI responses to a visuomotor learning task with and without the inclusion of voxel-wise vascular covariates of BOLD-CBV and the BOLD signal change per mmHg variation in end-tidal carbon dioxide (BOLD-CVR). The empirical measure of BOLD-CBV accounted for more between-subject variability in the motor task-induced BOLD responses than BOLD-CVR estimated from end-tidal carbon dioxide recordings. The new method can potentially increase the power of group fMRI studies by including a measure of vascular characteristics and has the strong practical advantage of not requiring experimental measurement of end-tidal carbon dioxide, unlike traditional methods to estimate BOLD-CVR. It also more closely represents a specific physiological characteristic of brain vasculature than BOLD-CVR, namely blood volume.