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Oxygen‐enhanced MRI of the brain
Author(s) -
Losert Christoph,
Peller Michael,
Schneider Philipp,
Reiser Maximilian
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
magnetic resonance in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.696
H-Index - 225
eISSN - 1522-2594
pISSN - 0740-3194
DOI - 10.1002/mrm.10215
Subject(s) - hyperoxia , breathing , oxygen , signal (programming language) , blood oxygenation , contrast (vision) , brain tissue , nuclear magnetic resonance , oxygenation , white matter , adaptation (eye) , biomedical engineering , nuclear medicine , computer science , chemistry , magnetic resonance imaging , biological system , neuroscience , functional magnetic resonance imaging , medicine , anesthesia , physics , radiology , artificial intelligence , biology , organic chemistry , programming language
Blood oxygenation level‐dependent (BOLD) contrast MRI is a potential method for a physiological characterization of tissue beyond mere morphological representation. The purpose of this study was to develop evaluation techniques for such examinations using a hyperoxia challenge. Administration of pure oxygen was applied to test these techniques, as pure oxygen can be expected to induce relatively small signal intensity (SI) changes compared to CO 2 ‐containing gases and thus requires very sensitive evaluation methods. Fourteen volunteers were investigated by alternating between breathing 100% O 2 and normal air, using two different paradigms of administration. Changes ranged from >30% in large veins to 1.71% ± 0.14% in basal ganglia and 0.82% ± 0.08% in white matter. To account for a slow physiological response function, a reference for correlation analysis was derived from the venous reaction. An objective method is presented that allows the adaptation of the significance threshold to the complexity of the paradigm used. Reference signal characteristics in representative brain tissue regions were established. As the presented evaluation scheme proved its applicability to small SI changes induced by pure oxygen, it can readily be used for similar experiments with other gases. Magn Reson Med 48:271–277, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.