Automated Quantitation of CSF Volumes in Central Nervous System by MRI

Ahmet Murat Bagci¹, Sudarshan Ranganathan¹, Juan S. Gomez¹, Byron Lam², Noam Alperin¹

The amount of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and its distribution with the central nervous system are central to our understanding of CSF related brain and spinal cord disorders. While reliable automated segmentation methods are available for brain, no such method is available for spinal CSF segmentation. Current segmentation of spinal CSF spaces relies on manual delineation which is time consuming and operator dependent. A methodology to delineate the volume of CSF within the whole central nervous system is presented and preliminary results were obtained from scans acquired before and after lumbar puncture.