Cerebral Oxygen Extraction Fraction Mapping with MRI: A Review of qBOLD, QSM, and Hybrid Techniques

This educational review details MRI-based oxygen extraction fraction (OEF) mapping techniques. Quantitative BOLD (qBOLD) and quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) are foundational, but hybrid QSM-qBOLD methods jointly use magnitude and phase data to improve source separation…

• Hybrid QSM-qBOLD (QQ) methods reduce unrealistic assumptions by combining susceptibility and magnitude information.
• Recent advances include Bayesian reconstruction and neural-network-based inference (QQ-NET) to improve computational efficiency.
• Validation remains challenging due to limited direct MRI-PET comparison studies.

Automated summary

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