Time-of-flight and black-blood MRI to study intracranial arteries in rats

Name: 7T MRI Seminar: Leveraging the potential of UHF scanners for fMRI studies
Start: 2026-04-21T12:00:00+02:00
End: 2026-04-21
Location: CIBM Seminar room at EPFL & online

AUTHORS: Cayron A. F., Bejuy O., Vargas M. I., Colin D. J., Aoki T., Lövblad K.-O., Bijlenga P., Kwak B. R., Allémann E., Morel S.

European Radiology Experimental, 8(3): , 09 January 2024

ABSTRACT

Intracranial aneurysms (IAs) are usually incidentally discovered by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Once discovered, the risk associated with their treatment must be balanced with the risk of an unexpected rupture. Although clinical observations suggest that the detection of contrast agent in the aneurysm wall using a double-inversion recovery black-blood (BB) sequence may point to IA wall instability, the exact meaning of this observation is not understood. Validation of reliable diagnostic markers of IA (in)stability is of utmost importance to deciding whether to treat or not an IA. To longitudinally investigate IA progression and enhance our understanding of this devastating disease, animal models are of great help. The aim of our study was to improve a three-dimensional (3D)-time-of-flight (TOF) sequence and to develop a BB sequence on a standard preclinical 3-T MRI unit to investigate intracranial arterial diseases in rats. We showed that our 3D-TOF sequence allows reliable measurements of intracranial artery diameters, inter-artery distances, and angles between arteries and that our BB sequence enables us to visualize intracranial arteries. We report the first BB-MRI sequence to visualize intracranial arteries in rats using a preclinical 3-T MRI unit. This sequence could be useful for a large community of researchers working on intracranial arterial diseases.