Biomed Eng Online
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Arterial spin labeling (ASL) provides a noninvasive way to measure cerebral blood flow (CBF). The CBF estimation from ASL is heavily contaminated by noise and the partial volume (PV) effect. The multiple measurements of perfusion signals in the ASL sequence are generally acquired and were averaged to suppress the noise. To correct the PV effect, several methods were proposed, but they were all performed directly on the averaged image, thereby ignoring the inherent perfusion information of mixed tissues that are embedded in multiple measurements. The aim of the present study is to correct the PV effect of ASL sequence using the inherent perfusion information in the multiple measurements. ⋯ This study validates the proposed sEM scheme for the statistical perfusion model of mixed tissues and demonstrates the effectiveness of using inherent perfusion information in the multiple measurements for PV correction of the ASL sequence.