Mapping of Myocardial ASL Perfusion and Perfusion Reserve Data

INTRODUCTION: Arterial spin labeling (ASL) is an emerging tool for the assessment of myocardial perfusion and perfusion reserve in humans. This technique requires registration of multiple images and suffers from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) [1-4]. In this work, we present a novel approach for mapping perfusion and perfusion reserve based on ASL data. Unregistered spatial data is transformed into a polar coordinate frame and then simultaneously filtered and re-sampled onto a polar grid to boost SNR while generating useful visualizations [5]. This approach is tailored to the formation of quantitative maps from unregistered low-SNR data, and is not specific to ASL.