Speaker
Description
We present our ongoing work to link brain perfusion with vascular structure, or angioarchitecture, using ultra-high-field 7 Tesla MRI. Perfusion reflects blood delivery to tissue, while angioarchitecture maps the arterial, venous, and microvascular pathways that enable that flow. The study combines arterial spin labelling (ASL) for cerebral blood flow with segmented multi-echo 3D EPI (ME3DEPI) and compares its reciprocal 1/T2-weighted contrast against standard time-of-flight (TOF) angiography. Results show that 1/T2-weighted imaging visualizes both arteries and veins in a single acquisition, capturing richer venous detail than TOF while still depicting major arteries. We find reduced artery-vein separability and weaker arterial contrast in smaller branches, but demonstrate that T2*-weighted imaging is a highly information-dense complement or alternative to TOF. Integrating ASL with ME3DEPI may improve anatomical localization and yield more precise perfusion analysis. We deem the presented approach as a route to better distinguish vascular anatomy from functional blood-flow measurements noninvasively.