Arterial spin labeling perfusion magnetic resonance imaging of non-human primates

Cerebral blood flow (CBF) provides critical information of brain physiology in preclinical and clinical studies. CBF can be measured quantitatively by using Xenon-133, PET, and MRI, or qualitatively with single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), laser Doppler flowmetry (1). Arterial spin labeling (ASL) (2-7) and dynamic susceptibility contrast MRI (DSC-MRI) (8,9) techniques are the most common perfusion MRI approaches for quantitative CBF measurement with high temporal and/or spatial resolution. Perfusion MRI has been routinely used in preclinical and clinical studies of various neurological diseases like stroke (10,11). In addition, CBF-based functional MRI (fMRI) is spatially more specific to the neural activity site and has less inter-subject variation than the blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI (12-15)