Automated Prescription of an Optimal Imaging Plane for Measurement of Cerebral Blood Flow by Phase Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Abstract

This study describes and evaluates a semiautomated method for prescribing an optimal imaging plane that is located as close as possible to the skull base, and is simultaneously nearly perpendicular to the four arteries leading blood to the brain [internal carotid arteries (ICAs) and vertebral arteries (VAs)]. Such a method will streamline and improve reliability of the measurement of total cerebral blood flow and intracranial pressure by velocity encoding phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging. The method first extracts the vessels' centerline from a 2-D time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiogram of the neck by performing distance transformations. An anatomical marker, the V2 segment of the VAs, is then identified to guide the imaging plane to be as close and below the skull base. An imaging plane that is nearly perpendicular to the ICAs and V2 segment of VAs is then identified by minimizing a misalignment value, estimated by a weighted mean of the angles between the plane's normal and the vessel axes at the vessel-plane intersections. The performance of the semiautomated method was evaluated by comparing manually selected planes to those found semiautomatically in nine magnetic resonance angiogram datasets. The semiautomated method consistently outperformed manual prescription with a significantly smaller misalignment value, 8.6° versus 20.7° (P < 0.001), respectively, and significantly improved reproducibility.

Does the brain have mechanical compliance?

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Computational Fluid Dynamics to Evaluate the Management of a Giant Internal Carotid Artery Aneurysm

“…Rather the questions provide motivation and direction for advancing the state-of-the-art in CFD modeling of cerebral aneurysm hemodynamics. Improvements in imaging are already providing patient-specific flow analysis for intracranial vasculature (Huang, Chang, Liao, & Ho, 2013;Huang, Wu, et al, 2013;Kudo et al, 2003;Teng, Bagci, & Alperin, 2011). A discourse has begun in the literature evaluating clinical history, aneurysm histology, and CFD to try and predict patient-specific risk profiles (Kawaguchi et al, 2012;Omodaka et al, 2012;Sanchez et al, 2013).…”