Determination of cerebral perfusion using magnetic resonance imaging

This thesis deals with various magnetic resonance imaging methods to quantify cerebral blood flow. Special attention has been drawn to noninvasive methods. A new method based on the T1-shortening due to perfusion was developed using a multipoint inversion recovery sequence with alternating slice selective and non selective preparation. To study the influence of errors arising from partial volume effects with cerebrospinal fluid and from brain motion, numerous investigations have been performed on a clinical 1.5 Tesla scanner. In a second approach, the IVIM-method, which treats isotropic movement in the capillary network like diffusion, has been investigated. Since artifacts in phase encoding direction caused by brain motion are a common problem to most diffusion imaging techniques, a significant improvement has been achieved by the development and optimization of a single shot STEAM-sequence. This sequence proved to be less sensitive for motion artifacts, although a high signal to noise ratio has been preserved. (author)