Brain blood flow measured with intravenous H2(15)O. II. Implementation and validation.

We have adapted the well-known tissue autoradiographic technique for the measurement of regional cerebral blood flow (CBF), originally proposed by Kety and his colleagues, for the measurement of CBF in human subjects using positron emission tomography (PET) and intravenously administered oxygen-15-labeled water. This report describes the steps necessary for the implementation of this PET/autoradiographic technique. In order to establish the accuracy of the method, we measured CBF with intravenously administered oxygen-15-labeled water and PET in anesthetized adult baboons and compared the results with blood flow measured by a standard tracer technique that uses residue detection of a bolus of oxygen-15-labeled water injected into the internal carotid artery. The correlation between CBF measured with PET and the true CBF for the same cerebral hemisphere was excellent. Over a blood-flow range of 10-63 ml/(min X 100 g), CBF (PET) = 0.90 CBF(true) + 0.40 (n = 23, r = 0.96, p less than 0.001). When blood flow exceeds 65 ml/(min X 100 g) CBF was progressively underestimated due to the known limitation of brain permeability to water.