Early development of arterial spin labeling to measure regional brain blood flow by MRI

Two major avenues of work converged in the late 1980's and early 1990's to give rise to brain perfusion MRI. The development of anatomical brain MRI quickly had as a major goal the generation of angiograms using tricks to label flowing blood in macroscopic vessels. These ideas were aimed at getting information about microcirculatory flow as well. Over the same time course the development of in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy had as its primary goal the assessment of tissue function and in particular, tissue energetics. For this the measurement of the delivery of water to tissue was critical for assessing tissue oxygenation and viability. The measurement of the washin/washout of “freely” diffusible tracers by spectroscopic based techniques pointed the way for quantitative approaches to measure regional blood flow by MRI. These two avenues came together in the development of arterial spin labeling (ASL) MRI techniques to measure regional cerebral blood flow. The early use of ASL to measure brain activation to help verify BOLD fMRI led to a rapid development of ASL based perfusion MRI. Today development and applications of regional brain blood flow measurements with ASL continues to be a major area of activity.