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Abstract #0671

Direct Quantification of Turbulent Shear Stresses by Multi-Point Phase-Contrast MRI

MAGNA25Christian Binter1, Verena Knobloch1, Andreas Sigfridsson1, Sebastian Kozerke1

1Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland


Excessive shear stresses in pathological flow situations can lead to platelet activation and damage of red blood cells. In-vivo assessment of shear stresses has, however, been impractical. In the present work it is demonstrated that turbulent shear stresses can be determined non-invasively using generalized phase-contrast MRI. Multi-point velocity encoding is employed to obtain information about velocity fluctuations along multiple directions, which permits quantification of turbulent kinetic energy and turbulent shear stresses. Measurements of artificial aortic valves in phantoms and in volunteers demonstrate the feasibility of the method in-vitro and in-vivo.