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Objective Aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of craniospinal interventions on cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow hydrodynamics and study the correlation of postoperative changes in flow alteration with clinical outcome. Materials and Methods Fifty patients who underwent various craniospinal procedures were studied using conventional and phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PCMRI) protocol. CSF flow quantification was performed at cerebral aqueduct, foramen magnum, C2–3, and D12–L1 vertebral levels with site showing maximal alteration of CSF flow dynamics considered as the region of interest. Velocity encoding was kept at 20 cm/s. Patients with pathology atcraniovertebral junction were considered separately (group I) from others (group II) due to different flow dynamics. Follow-up scans were performed after an interval of 1 month for temporal evaluation of changes in CSF flow dynamics. Results Patients in both groups showed a significant change in peak CSF velocity postoperatively (mean change of 1.34 cm/s in group I and 0.28 cm/s in group II) with bidirectional improvement in flow on cine-phase-contrast qualitative images. Regional pain (82%) and headache (46%) were seen in most of the patients preoperatively. Postoperatively clinical symptoms improved in 59.5%, static in 26.2%, and worsened in 14.3%. In both the groups, an improvement in clinical symptomatology had significant correlation with mean changes in peak CSF velocity postoperatively (p = 0.04 in both groups). Conclusion PCMRI can effectively evaluate changes in CSF flow noninvasively both pre- and postoperatively. This may have potential role in determining clinical outcome and prognosis of patients undergoing procedures in craniospinal axis.

Objective Aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of craniospinal interventions on cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow hydrodynamics and study the correlation of postoperative changes in flow alteration with clinical outcome. Materials and Methods Fifty patients who underwent various craniospinal procedures were studied using conventional and phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PCMRI) protocol. CSF flow quantification was performed at cerebral aqueduct, foramen magnum, C2–3, and D12–L1 vertebral levels with site showing maximal alteration of CSF flow dynamics considered as the region of interest. Velocity encoding was kept at 20 cm/s. Patients with pathology atcraniovertebral junction were considered separately (group I) from others (group II) due to different flow dynamics. Follow-up scans were performed after an interval of 1 month for temporal evaluation of changes in CSF flow dynamics. Results Patients in both groups showed a significant change in peak CSF velocity postoperatively (mean change of 1.34 cm/s in group I and 0.28 cm/s in group II) with bidirectional improvement in flow on cine-phase-contrast qualitative images. Regional pain (82%) and headache (46%) were seen in most of the patients preoperatively. Postoperatively clinical symptoms improved in 59.5%, static in 26.2%, and worsened in 14.3%. In both the groups, an improvement in clinical symptomatology had significant correlation with mean changes in peak CSF velocity postoperatively (p = 0.04 in both groups). Conclusion PCMRI can effectively evaluate changes in CSF flow noninvasively both pre- and postoperatively. This may have potential role in determining clinical outcome and prognosis of patients undergoing procedures in craniospinal axis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Recent advances in 3D-PCMRI (phase contrast MRI) sequences allow for measuring the complex hemodynamics in cerebral arteries. However, the small size of these vessels vs spatial resolution can lead to non-negligible partial volume artifacts, which must be taken into account when computing blood flow rates. For this purpose, we combined the velocity information provided by 3D-PCMRI with vessel geometry measured with 3DTOF (time of flight MRI) or 3DRA (3D rotational angiography) to correct the partial volume effects in flow rate assessments. Methods The proposed methodology was first tested in vitro on cylindrical and patient specific vessels subject to fully controlled pulsatile flows. Both 2D- and 3D-PCMRI measurements using various spatial resolutions ranging from 20 to 1.3 voxels per vessel diameter were analyzed and compared with flowmeter baseline. Second, 3DTOF, 2D- and 3D-PCMRI measurements were performed in vivo on 35 patients harboring internal carotid artery (ICA) aneurysms indicated for endovascular treatments requiring 3DRA imaging. Results The in vitro 2D- and 3D-PCMRI mean flow rates assessed with partial volume correction showed very low sensitivity to the acquisition resolution above [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Additional hemodynamic parameters are highly desirable in the clinical management of intracranial aneurysm rupture as static medical images cannot demonstrate the blood flow within aneurysms. There are two ways of obtaining the hemodynamic information-by phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PCMRI) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In this paper, we compared PCMRI and CFD in the analysis of a stable patient's specific aneurysm. The results showed that PCMRI and CFD are in good agreement with each other. An additional CFD study of two stable and two ruptured aneurysms revealed that ruptured aneurysms have a higher statistical average blood velocity, wall shear stress, and oscillatory shear index (OSI) within the aneurysm sac compared to those of stable aneurysms. Furthermore, for ruptured aneurysms, the OSI divides the positive and negative wall shear stress divergence at the aneurysm sac. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a new variational framework for the problem of reconstructing flow fields from noisy measurements. The formalism is based on regularizers penalizing the singular values of the Jacobian of the field. Specifically, we rely on the nuclear norm. Our method is invariant with respect to fundamental transformations and can be efficiently solved. We conduct numerical experiments on several phantom data and report improved performance compared to existing vectorial extensions of total variation and curl-divergence regularizations. Finally, we apply our reconstruction method to an experimentally-acquired phase-contrast MRI recording for enhancing the data visualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To perform experimental validation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applied to patient specific coronary aneurysm anatomy of Kawasaki disease. We quantified hemodynamics in a patient-specific coronary artery aneurysm physical phantom under physiologic rest and exercise flow conditions. Using phase contrast MRI (PCMRI), we acquired 3-component flow velocity at two slice locations in the aneurysms. We then performed numerical simulations with the same geometry and inflow conditions, and performed qualitative and quantitative comparisons of velocities between experimental measurements and simulation results. We observed excellent qualitative agreement in flow pattern features. The quantitative spatially and temporally varying differences in velocity between PCMRI and CFD were proportional to the flow velocity. As a result, the percent discrepancy between simulation and experiment was relatively constant regardless of flow velocity variations. Through 1D and 2D quantitative comparisons, we found a 5-17% difference between measured and simulated velocities. Additional analysis assessed wall shear stress differences between deformable and rigid wall simulations. This study demonstrated that CFD produced good qualitative and quantitative predictions of velocities in a realistic coronary aneurysm anatomy under physiological flow conditions. The results provide insights on factors that may influence the level of agreement, and a set of in vitro experimental data that can be used by others to compare against CFD simulation results. The findings of this study increase confidence in the use of CFD for investigating hemodynamics in the specialized anatomy of coronary aneurysms. This provides a basis for future hemodynamics studies in patient-specific models of Kawasaki disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose To propose and evaluate an anisotropic diffusion filter to improve visualization and analysis of the thoracic aorta local hemodynamics from phase-contrast MRI sensitivity encoding imaging. Methods The filter parameters were tailored to the phase-contrast MRI sensitivity encoding data, using a simple calibration procedure. The filter was applied to 20 phase-contrast MR image studies (five subjects acquired with four different sensitivity encoding reduction factors). The filter effect was estimated with respect to image quality (noise in velocity images, σn), regularity of the velocity fields (divergence; relative error in velocity magnitude, and absolute error in flow direction), aorta flow pattern visualization (streamlines, secondary flows) and flow rate quantification. Results σn decreased up to three times, divergence, error in velocity magnitude, and absolute error in flow direction decreased (by at least 313, 40, and 10%, respectively), indicating less noisy and more regular velocity fields after filtering. Streamline analysis confirmed the beneficial effect of anisotropic diffusion filter, both visually and quantitatively (streamline numbers increased by 207% in whole cardiac cycle and by 180% in systolic phase). A high correlation ( r = 0.99) between the prefiltering and postfiltering aortic flow rate values was found. Conclusion The anisotropic diffusion filter approach can be considered effective in improving the visualization and analysis of the thoracic aorta hemodynamics from phase-contrast MRI sensitivity encoding images. Magn Reson Med 71:1621-1631, 2014. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]