The pulsatile motion of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in the spinal canal includes a mean Lagrangian drift, representing the cumulative net displacement experienced by the fluid over each oscillatory cycle. Quantifying this motion in vivo is challenging because the associated velocities (\(\sim \)cm min\(\vphantom^)\)are much smaller than those of the dominant oscillatory flow (\(\sim \) cm s\(\vphantom^\)), limiting the applicability of conventional phase-contrast (PC) MRI. Here we assess the suitability of Time-Spatial Labeling Inversion Pulse MRI (Time-SLIP) for characterizing this motion using in vitro experiments in a spinal-canal phantom.
The phantom consists of a flexible tube with a rigid insert forming an eccentric annular canal representative of the spinal subarachnoid space, driven by a 1 Hz sinusoidal flow mimicking cardiac-induced CSF pulsations. Oscillatory velocities were measured with PC-MRI, while net fluid displacement over successive cycles was quantified using Time-SLIP and compared with numerical simulations. The measurements reveal spatially varying Lagrangian drift directed caudally in narrow regions and cranially in wider regions of the annulus, with magnitude scaling with the square of the local stroke volume.
These results demonstrate that Time-SLIP can quantify mean Lagrangian motion associated with pulsatile CSF flow. The senior author (ALS) gratefully acknowledges Dr. Alexander Norbash, currently at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, for insightful discussions that inspired this work.
This work was partly funded by the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke through contract No. 1R01NS120343-01 and by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through projects PID2023-151343NB-C31, PID2023-151343NB-C32 and PID2023-151343NB-C33, financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ FEDER, UE. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California - San Diego, La Jolla, San Diego, USA Obed Campos, Stephanie Sincomb, Geno Pawlak & Antonio L. Sánchez Departamento de Mecánica Aplicada e Ingeniería de Proyectos, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain Department of Radiology, University of California - San Diego, San Diego, USA Departamento de Ingeniería Térmica y de Fluidos, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Spain Departamento de Ingeniería Mecánica y Minera, Universidad de Jaén, Jaén, Spain Área de Mecánica de Fluidos, Departamento de Mecánica de Estructuras e Ingeniería Hidráulica, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain Instituto Interuniversitario de Investigación del Sistema Tierra en Andalucía (IISTA), Granada, Spain Cándido Gutiérrez-Montes & Carlos Martínez-Bazán The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Campos, O., Alaminos-Quesada, J., Sincomb, S. et al.
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