Robust perfusion maps in Arterial Spin Labeling by means of M-estimators

International audienceNon-invasive measurement of Cerebral Blood Flow (CBF) is now feasible thanks to the introduction of Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques. To date, due to the low signal-to-noise ratio of ASL, a single acquisition (pair of control/label scans) is not sufficient to estimate perfusion reliably. Instead, the acquisition is usually repeated several times and the perfusion information is calculated by averaging across the repetitions. However, due to its zero breakdown point, the sample mean is very sensitive to outliers. In this paper, we propose to compute ASL CBF maps using Huber's M-estimator, a robust statistical function that is not overly impacted by outliers. This method is compared to an empirical approach, introduced in [1], based on z-score thresholding