Use of a Simple Breath-Holding Task for Cerebrovascular Reactivity Scans in Clinical Functional MR Imaging

Functional MR imaging is a powerful tool for presurgical mapping of cerebral language and motor activity as a means of assessing and mitigating neurosurgical risk to eloquent cortex. Breath-hold scans allow radiologists to correctly interpret fMRI mapping studies by assessing cerebrovascular reactivity and the detectability of cerebral blood oxygenation level dependent contrast on a regional basis. We present a simple and reproducible method for obtaining breath-hold scans and illustrate their clinical use in normal and pathologic conditions.