Effect of vascular crushing on FAIR perfusion kinetics, using a BIR-4 pulse in a magnetization prepared FLASH sequence.

Flow-sensitive alternating inversion recovery (FAIR) perfusion imaging suffers from high vascular signal, resulting in artifacts and overestimation of perfusion. With TurboFLASH acquisition, crushing of vascular signal by bipolar gradients after each excitation is difficult due to the requirement of an ultrashort repetition time. Therefore, insertion of a preparation phase in the FAIR sequence, after labeling and prior to TurboFLASH acquisition, is proposed. A segmented adiabatic BIR-4 pulse, interleaved with crusher gradients, was used for flow crushing. The effect of the crusher preparation is shown as a function of crusher strength for a flow phantom and in rat brain. Influence of crusher strength on the time-dependent FAIR signal from rat brain was also measured. Signal from flowing spins in a flow phantom and from arterial spins in rat brain was significantly suppressed. Image quality was improved and the overestimation of perfusion at short inflow times was eliminated.