The Cerebral Vascular Enhancement Effect in Establishing Diffusion Tensor Imaging Protocols

The focus of this paper is to investigate the significance of the cerebral vascular enhancement effect on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) datasets and in establishing appropriate DTI imaging protocols. Two DTI scans are performed on each subject during the same imaging session. Between DTI scans, 22 minutes of a visual tracking experiment and 3 minutes of an alternating breath hold experiment are performed. These functional tasks, in particular the breath hold task, increase the blood flow and volume to study the vascular enhancement between the two DTI scans. Data collected from four healthy control subjects are analyzed in DTI Studio and quantified using fractional anisotropy. ROIs were selected in close proximity to the blood supply from three main cerebral arteries (posterior, middle, and anterior). Preliminary results suggest that there is a significant cerebral vascular enhancement effect between a DTI scan performed at the beginning of the experiment versus a DTI scan performed at the end of the experiment.