Cerebrovascular 5D flow MRI

Abstract

Background: 4D flow MRI facilitates quantification of cardiac phase-resolved blood velocity vector fields and has successfully been deployed to study cerebrovascular flow. Besides cardiac-induced flow pulsation, respiration is known to modulate arterial and venous blood flow in the brain. Quantification of the respiratory flow modulation (RFM) holds potential to further our insights into vascular coupling and improve our understanding of cerebral circulation in general.

Methods: A 5D phase-contrast flow MRI framework was developed to volumetrically quantify RFM by resolving velocity vector fields over the cardiac and respiratory cycle, with high spatial (0.82 mm isotropic) and cardiac (55 ms) resolutions, using two respiratory states whilst accounting for variable physiological RFM delays, with a reasonable acquisition time (20 min at 60 bpm). Recent advances in deep learning-based image reconstruction and analysis methods are incorporated to facilitate the approach.

Results: The 5D flow MRI framework was validated in 10 healthy volunteers with reference to fully sampled respiratory-resolved 2D flow MRI orthogonal to the internal carotid artery (ICA), yielding Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.97 and 0.90 and biases of and 0.09 % and 1.77 % for RFM of mean velocity magnitude and amplitude, respectively. The value of cerebrovascular 5D flow MRI is demonstrated using full-field spatially resolved RFM quantification of mean velocity and velocity amplitude, revealing a high physiological intra-subject variability.

Conclusion: Cerebrovascular 5D flow MRI enables the study of full-field respiratory flow modulation holding potential of furthering our understanding of cerebral circulation.

Keywords: 4D Flow MRI; 5D Flow MRI; Brain; Cerebral circulation; Flow quantification, Phase-contrast MRI.