Influence of Arterial Transit Time Delay in Arterial Spin Labeling on Differentiating Tumor Progression and Pseudo-Progression in Glioblastoma

Abstract

In the clinical follow-up of glioblastoma patients, presence of delayed arterial transit times (ATT) could affect the evaluation of ASL perfusion data. In this retrospective study the influence of the presence and severity of ATT-artifacts on perfusion assessment and differentiation between tumor progression and pseudo-progression were studied. The results show that the presence of ATT-artifacts lowers the agreement between radiological evaluation of DSC-MRI and ASL, although the severity of ATT-artifacts did not have significant influence. In conclusion, detection of ATT-artifacts is important as it could affect radiological evaluation of ASL-data. Future work aims to include additional quantitative perfusion measures.