Does cerebrospinal fluid pulsation affect diffusion-weighted imaging thermometry? A study in healthy volunteers

Area of Science:

• Neuroimaging
• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Physics

Background:

• Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) offers noninvasive brain temperature measurement.
• Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pulsatile flow may potentially influence DWI accuracy.
• Understanding this influence is crucial for reliable DWI thermometry.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of CSF pulsation speeds on DWI-based brain thermometry.
• To determine if CSF flow variations affect the accuracy of noninvasive brain temperature measurements.
• To validate DWI thermometry under different physiological conditions.

Main Methods:

• 104 healthy participants underwent 3-T MRI scans.
• DWI-based brain temperature (T_DWI) was measured at varying CSF pulsation speeds.
• Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS)-based temperature (T_MRS) served as the reference standard.
• Statistical analysis (Student's t-test) compared temperature differences (ΔT) across CSF speeds.

Main Results:

• No significant differences in ΔT were observed across different CSF pulsation speeds (p > 0.05).
• No significant linear correlation was found between ΔT and CSF flow speed.
• DWI thermometry, using clinical settings, showed no effect of CSF pulsation on temperature estimation.

Conclusions:

• CSF pulsation speed does not significantly impact the accuracy of DWI-based brain thermometry.
• DWI thermometry is a robust noninvasive method for measuring deep brain temperatures, unaffected by physiological CSF flow variations.
• Clinical acquisition settings for DWI thermometry effectively mitigate potential influences from CSF pulsations.