Simultaneous Assessment of Arterial Pulsatility Across Multiple Segments of Cerebral Arteries Using Multiband...

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Cardiovascular Science
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Cerebral arterial pulsatility is crucial for brain health.
• Assessing pulsatility across multiple arterial segments is challenging.
• Aging and neurodegenerative diseases affect cerebrovascular function.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and validate a novel multiband dual-VENC 2D PC-MRI (MB-DV PC-MRI) technique.
• To simultaneously measure arterial pulsatility in proximal and distal cerebral arteries.
• To investigate age-related differences in cerebral arterial pulsatility and damping.

Main Methods:

• Development of a multiband SINC RF pulse for simultaneous multi-slice excitation.
• Implementation of a retrospectively gated MB-DV PC-MRI sequence.
• Acquisition of data from young and elderly adult cohorts for pulsatility index (PI) and damping factor (DF) calculation.

Main Results:

• MB-DV PC-MRI demonstrated good reproducibility and reliability for cerebral PI measurements.
• The damping factor (DF) calculation showed good reproducibility.
• Elderly adults exhibited higher PI values and varied damping compared to younger adults.

Conclusions:

• MB-DV PC-MRI is a reliable technique for assessing arterial pulsatility across the cerebrovascular tree.
• This technique can reveal age-related changes in cerebral hemodynamics.
• MB-DV PC-MRI may serve as a valuable tool for studying cerebrovascular dysfunction in aging and neurodegenerative diseases.