Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 25, 2026
An In Vivo Blood-brain Barrier Permeability Assay in Mice Using Fluorescently Labeled Tracers
Published on: February 26, 2018
Imaging Venous Transit Time and Blood-Brain Barrier Permeability of the Deep Brain
Wen Shi1,2, Jie Song1,2, Jiani Wu1,2
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Purpose:
Imaging of venous vessels with advanced pulse sequences allows the assessment of important hemodynamic parameters. Previous work has measured venous transit time (VTT) and blood-brain barrier (BBB) water permeability in cortical tissue. This study aimed to measure VTT and BBB permeability in the deep brain through imaging in the straight sinus (SS).
Methods:
Two studies were conducted. Study I measured VTT of the deep brain using a Venous-transit-time-Imaging-by-Changes-in-T1-Relaxation (VICTR) MRI sequence. The obtained VTT was used in study II to optimize the imaging parameters of Water-Extraction-with-Phase-Contrast-Arterial-Spin-Tagging (WEPCAST) MRI pulse sequence, and the permeability-surface-area product (PS) was quantified in the deep brain. Test-retest reproducibility was assessed.
Results:
SS VTT was found to be 2807.5 ± 349.5 ms, which was approximately half a second shorter than the SSS VTT (3365.0 ± 235.3 ms, p < 0.001). The SS VTT results were reproducible across repetitions, with a coefficient of variation of 2.8% ± 0.5%. The standard deviation of the VTT distribution in SS was 973.7 ± 48.1 ms, again shorter than the corresponding SSS values (1165.5 ± 37.2 ms, p < 0.001). The water extraction fraction, E, from the SS was 94.8% ± 1.9%, and the deep-brain PS was 141.3 ± 20.2 mL/100 g/min. The PS values were slightly lower than the cortical PS of 152.9 ± 20.9 mL/100 g/min (p = 0.039), and may reflect the lower vascularity in the deep-brain region. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of the deep-brain PS values from repeated runs was 0.863.
Conclusion:
This is the first study to measure two parameters associated with deep-brain physiology, specifically VTT and BBB water permeability, and provide their normative values.
More Related Videos
06:26Analyzing the Permeability of the Blood-Brain Barrier by Microbial Traversal through Microvascular Endothelial Cells
Published on: February 14, 2020
07:22Assessment of Blood-brain Barrier Permeability by Intravenous Infusion of FITC-labeled Albumin in a Mouse Model of Neurodegenerative Disease
Published on: November 8, 2017
Related Concept Videos
00:49The Blood-brain Barrier
01:25Physiological Barriers
The blood endothelial barrier is the most porous of these. It allows all small ionized, un-ionized, and lipophilic molecules to pass through the endothelial lining into the interstitial space...
01:23Factors Affecting Drug Distribution: Physiological Barriers
The capillary endothelial barrier allows only smaller molecules below 600 Da (Daltons) to pass through. It also restricts drugs like heparin that are bound to blood components, limiting their movement within the bloodstream.
The...
01:02Noncompartmental Analysis: Mean Transit, Absorption and Dissolution Time
One of the key parameters is the mean transit time (MTT), which refers to the total duration required for drug molecules to transit through the body. MTT is determined by calculating the ratio of the area under the moment curve to the area...