Abstract #3138

Quantitative Assessment of the Intracranial Vasculature of an Elderly Population using the intraCranial Artery Feature Extraction (iCafe) Technique

Li Chen¹, Quan Yuan², Niranjan Balu³, Isabelle Yuan⁴, Daniel S Hippe ³, Jie Sun³, Xihai Zhao⁵, Rui Li⁵, Le He⁵, Jenq-Neng Hwang¹, and Chun Yuan³

¹Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States, ²Neurology, Xuanwu hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China, ³Radiology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States, ⁴Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, United States, ⁵Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

iCafe is a novel technique which semi-automatically traces intracranial arteries from 3D magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) and computes corresponding quantitative morphometry and intensity features. MRA images of 100 healthy subjects (age 57-85) were processed and 8 representative features were extracted. We found significant decreases in total artery length (p=0.026), distal artery length (p=0.025), and number of branches (p=0.005) with increasing age using linear regression. These results suggest reduced vascularity with age, consistent with prior results showing cerebral blood flow with age. iCafe may be a useful tool to generalize systemic quantitative measurements of intracranial vascular structures.

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