Simultaneous assessment of cerebral arterial, venous, and CSF flow dynamics using multiband dual-VENC phase-contrast MRI

Motivation: Blood-neurofluid-coupling plays an important role in maintaining brain's health and function. However, conventional 2D PC-MRI requires multiple separate scans to image blood and CSF dynamics, which is time-inefficient and sensitive to inter-scan heartbeat variability and physiological movements. Goal(s): To develop a multi-band dual-VENC PC-MRI (MB-DV PC-MRI) to simultaneously measure CSF, arterial, and venous dynamics within a short scan. Approach: MB-DV PC-MRI sequence was designed by integrating multi-band RF and dual-VENC into 2D PC-MRI sequence acquisition. Results: Flow waveforms and hemodynamic measures of arteries, veins, and CSF at different levels were successfully depicted by MB-DV PC-MRI, matching closely with those by multi-scan 2D PC-MRI. Impact: MD-DV PC-MRI enables simultaneously assessing CSF, arterial, and venous dynamics at multiple segments in the brain within a short scan time, which could be a potentially useful MRI technique to study blood-neurofluid coupling in both cerebrovascular and neurodegenerative diseases.