Quantification of cardiac-locked brainstem velocity at high resolution based on retrospectively-gated DENSE MRI at 7T

The motion of the brain tissue within the skull is thought to be induced by cardiac pulsations and other hemodynamic processes and may influence CSF flow, but its precise drivers and downstream effects are unclear. Understanding these phenomena requires an accurate and precise method of tissue motion quantification that can be extended to investigate multiple potential drivers of tissue motion in vivo.

Here, a version of the Displacement ENcoding with Stimulated Echoes (DENSE) pulse sequence was implemented to measure cardiac-locked velocity responses in the pons and midbrain in eight healthy volunteers. The method featured retrospective cardiac gating, a single mixing time, and measured multiple voxel sizes.

A previously undescribed double-peak pattern of cardiac-locked longitudinally directed brainstem velocity was identified that appears to reflect both nonrigid and rigid motion components. This pattern was only visible when estimating the cardiac response using absolute time after systole instead of the percentage of the cardiac cycle. Measurements were performed in a custom-built slow-flow phantom, and repeat sessions were acquired in two volunteers to assess accuracy and precision. Despite potential increased influence of CSF motion with larger voxel sizes, no voxel-size-dependent bias was found in the velocity estimations. Lack of voxel size bias was attributed to the complexities of partial-volume effects between CSF and tissue in phase-valued data that were evaluated using numerical simulations.

In sum, a method to measure brain tissue motion with high spatiotemporal precision is presented that can be extended to applications beyond measuring cardiac-locked motion.