What is ASL?

Image from J.-C. Ferré, E. Bannier, H. Raoult, G. Mineur, B. Carsin-Nicol, J.-Y. Gauvrit, Arterial spin labeling (ASL) perfusion: Techniques and clinical use, Diagnostic and Interventional Imaging.

Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) is a relatively new MRI perfusion modality that changes the magnetization of blood water protons to use them as an endogenous tracer. ASL is a completely non-invasive imaging modality, meaning that it requires neither ionizing radiation nor the administration of an exogenous contrast agent. Non- invasiveness has several advantages for clinical research: it is possible to repeat the CBF measurement as frequently as desired and the measurement can be applied in vulnerable populations such as patients with renal failure or children .

Henk-Jan Mutsaerts

Lecture on ASL

Exemplary ExploreASL results

From these results with 10 heterogeneous test datasets, it seems that we have fixed the reproducibility between Matlab versions, and Unix-type OS/machine differences are small. However, still Windows vs Unix-system differences remain, which could be due to JavaVM architecture differences. We could test this by running these tests but disabling the JavaVM.