Why the study?
Does a transcranial Doppler-based estimator accurately predict cerebral blood flow compared to MRI in older patients?
Does a transcranial Doppler-based estimator accurately predict cerebral blood flow compared to MRI in older patients?
Transcranial Doppler-based surrogates for cerebral blood flow correlate poorly with MRI measurements, challenging the common assumption that perfusion can be reliably inferred from stem artery blood flow velocity.
It is commonly assumed that perfusion in a given cerebral territory can be inferred from Blood Flow Velocity (BFV) measurements in the corresponding stem artery. In order to test this hypothesis, we construct a cerebral blood flow (CBF) estimator based on transcranial Doppler (TCD) blood flow velocity and ten other easily available patient characteristics and clinical parameters. A total of 261 measurements were collected from 88 older patients. The estimator is based on local regression (Random Forest). Its performance is analyzed against baseline CBF from 3-D pseudocontinuous arterial spin labeling (pCASL) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Patient specific CBF predictions are of poor quality (r = 0.41 and p-value = 4.5 × 10-12); the hypothesis is thus not clearly supported by evidence.
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Hart et al. (2016) studied this question.
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