Correction for vascular artifacts in cerebral blood flow values measured by using arterial spin tagging techniques.

"Vascular" artifacts can have substantial effects on human cerebral blood flow values calculated by using arterial spin tagging approaches. One vascular artifact arises from the contribution of "tagged" arterial water spins to the observed change in brain water MR signal. This artifact can be reduced if large bipolar gradients are used to "crush" the MR signal from moving arterial water spins. A second vascular artifact arises from relaxation of "tagged" arterial blood during transit from the tagging plane to the capillary exchange site in the imaging slice. This artifact can be corrected if the arterial transit times are measured by using "dynamic" spin tagging approaches. The mean transit time from the tagging plane to capillary exchange sites in a gray matter region of interest was calculated to be approximately 0.94 s. Cerebral blood flow values calculated for seven normal volunteers agree reasonably well with values calculated by using radioactive tracer approaches.