Partial volume correction for arterial spin labeling using the inherent perfusion information of multiple measurements

Background Arterial spin labeling (ASL) provides a noninvasive way to measure cerebral blood flow (CBF). The CBF estimation from ASL is heavily contaminated by noise and the partial volume (PV) effect. The multiple measurements of perfusion signals in the ASL sequence are generally acquired and were averaged to suppress the noise. To correct the PV effect, several methods were proposed, but they were all performed directly on the averaged image, thereby ignoring the inherent perfusion information of mixed tissues that are embedded in multiple measurements. The aim of the present study is to correct the PV effect of ASL sequence using the inherent perfusion information in the multiple measurements. Methods In this study, we first proposed a statistical perfusion model of mixed tissues based on the distribution of multiple measurements. Based on the tissue mixture that was obtained from the high-resolution structural image, a structure-based expectation maximization (sEM) scheme was developed to estimate the perfusion contributions of different tissues in a mixed voxel from its multiple measurements. Finally, the performance of the proposed method was evaluated using both computer simulations and in vivo data. Results Compared to the widely used linear regression (LR) method, the proposed sEM-based method performs better on edge preservation, noise suppression, and lesion detection, and demonstrates a potential to estimate the CBF within a shorter scanning time. For in vivo data, the corrected CBF values of gray matter (GM) were independent of the GM probability, thereby indicating the effectiveness of the sEM-based method for the PV correction of the ASL sequence. Conclusions This study validates the proposed sEM scheme for the statistical perfusion model of mixed tissues and demonstrates the effectiveness of using inherent perfusion information in the multiple measurements for PV correction of the ASL sequence.