Keywords:
CNS, Neuroradiology brain, MR, Experimental, MR-Functional imaging, Experimental investigations, Imaging sequences, Technical aspects, Cerebrospinal fluid, Haemodynamics / Flow dynamics, Obstruction / Occlusion
Authors:
A. Najafi1, T. D. J. Sartoretti2, C. A. Binkert1, S. Sartoretti-Schefer1, M. Wyss2; 1Winterthur/CH, 2Zürich/CH
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2018/C-1577
Aims and objectives
Flow measurements in the cerebral aqueduct are helpful adjuncts to clinical and morphological criteria in differentiating communicating normal pressure hydrocephalus from non-communicating obstructive hydrocephalus due to aqueductal stenosis.
Quantification of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow within the cerebral aqueduct can be quantified using phase contrast MRI (1,
2) utilizing the same principles as blood flow measurements in cardiac MR imaging.
Several parameters like peak flow velocity,
flow average or stroke volume can be determined.
So far,
this technique has not gained widespread acceptance mainly because of highly variable and inconsistent reference values in the literature (1,
3,
4) which makes comparison studies difficult to set up and interpret.
The obtained values depend on different factors such as specific MR machine,
field strength,
sequence parameters,
post processing software (5) as wells as patient age and gender (4).
Hence,
aqueductal flow measurement is still not used widely in clinical routine practice.
We re-evaluated this method on a 3T MR scanner and investigated the influence of different parameters on healthy volunteers from the study group and a phantom to optimize scanning parameters and investigate necessary post-processing steps to obtain consistent and reliable flow parameters.