Quantitative BOLD

Oxygen extraction fraction (OEF) is a physiological marker indicating the percent of oxygen extracted from the blood supply of the brain, that directly relates to brain oxygen metabolism. Recent studies have shown that OEF may be a sensitive physiological biomarker to early, and subtle physiological changes before visible damage in AD. We propose to utilize a novel non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method to map brain tissue OEF using quantitative measurements of the blood-oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) MRI signal.