Balanced Steady-State Free Precession and Radial Sampling for Arterial Spin Labeled Perfusion Imaging

Arterial spin labeling (ASL) is a non-invasive MRI technique that allows to quantitatively measure cerebral blood flow. However, the major limitation of ASL is in the intrinsically low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Balanced steady-state free precession (bSSFP) sequence has been proposed to mitigate this limitation, however, bSSFP is sensitive to off-resonance effects. ASL perfusion imaging with bSSFP can be sensitive to effects from motion and flow when Cartesian sampling scheme is used. This work proposes and investigates radial sampling scheme for ASL with bSSFP to allow perfusion imaging with relatively high SNR and robustness to motion and off-resonance effects.