Investigation of Blood-Flow Changes During Cognitive Task Activation using CASL

Functional perfusion imaging (p-fMRI) was applied for the first time to a cognitive paradigm that produces activations in a number of brain regions. An adapted single-trial version of the color-word Stroop interference task was used as a paradigm. This experiment is known to produce robust activations in the lateral prefrontal, the fronto-median, and parietal cortices. Perfusion contrast was created by continuous arterial spin labeling (CASL) of the blood in the left common carotid artery, and was applied for all repetitions of the functional run in a quasi-continuous fashion, i.e., it was interrupted only durin…