Intravoxel incoherent motion as a surrogate marker of perfused vascular density in rat brain

Intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) MRI has emerged as a valuable technique for the assessment of tissue characteristics and perfusion. However, there is limited knowledge about the relationship between IVIM-derived measures and changes at the level of the vascular network. In this study, we investigated the potential use of IVIM MRI as a noninvasive tool for measuring changes in cerebral vascular density. Variations in quantitative immunohistochemical measurements of the vascular density across different regions in the rat brain (cortex, corpus callosum, hippocampus, thalamus, and hypothalamus) were related to the pseudo-diffusion coefficient D* and the flowing blood fraction f in healthy Wistar rats. We assessed whether region-wise differences in the vascular density are reflected by variations in the IVIM measurements and found a significant positive relationship with the pseudo-diffusion coefficient (p < 0.05, β = 0.24). The effect of cerebrovascular alterations, such as blood-brain barrier (BBB) disruption on the perfusion-related IVIM parameters, is not well understood. Therefore, we investigated the effect of BBB disruption on the IVIM measures in a rat model of metabolic and vascular comorbidities (ZSF1 obese rat) and assessed whether this affects the relationship between the cerebral vascular density and the noninvasive IVIM measurements. We observed increased vascular permeability without detecting any differences in diffusivity, suggesting that BBB leakage is present before changes in the tissue integrity. We observed no significant difference in the relationship between cerebral vascular density and the IVIM measurements in our model of comorbidities compared with healthy normotensive rats.