Mukund Balasubramanian1,
Padma Sundaram1, William M. Wells, III2, Robert V.
Mulkern1, Darren B. Orbach1
1Radiology,
Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States; 2Radiology,
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States
Understanding the behavior of ionic volume currents in the presence of strong magnetic fields could assist efforts to use functional MRI to detect epileptiform discharges, especially when these discharges occur near cerebrospinal fluid spaces such as the lateral ventricles. However, studies on this topic are controversial: two competing mechanisms have been proposed to account for the behavior of these currentsthe Lorentz effect model and the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model. Here, we address this controversy by directly testing the MHD hypothesis using an ionic current phantom and currents of varying duration. Our results provide experimental support for the MHD hypothesis.