[Application of flow-sensitive alternating inversion recovery (FAIR) to brain functional imaging].

Flow-sensitive alternating inversion recovery (FAIR), which is an excellent method of non-invasive assessment of cerebral blood flow (CBF), was applied to brain function. Because blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) is an established method at present, brain functional imaging by FAIR was compared with BOLD. A few minutes is the necessary scanning time in FAIR targeted for brain ischemia. For BOLD, however, scanning time in a state is several seconds. A method of improving problems with scanning time was examined. There was no problem about the stability of the signal when scanning in design method, and a similar signal change was able to be confirmed. Additionally, there was no difference between each method concerning the activated part (p > 0.05). However, the activated area in FAIR was smaller than in BOLD (p < 0.01). Brain functional imaging by FAIR offers fewer advantages than BOLD. Yet it seems that reliability increases when measurements are made by the two methods using different mechanisms.