Abstract #1287

Visual stimulus-evoked blood velocity responses at far upstream branches of the Posterior Cerebral Artery measured with phase-contrast fMRA

Zhangxuan Hu^1,2, Sebastien Proulx^1,2, Daniel E. P. Gomez^1,2, Divya Varadarajan^1,2, Saskia Bollmann³, Can Ozan Tan⁴, Elif Gokcal^5,6, M. Edip Gurol^5,6, and Jonathan R. Polimeni^1,2,7

¹Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, ²Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ³School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, ⁴Department of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands, ⁵J. Philip Kistler Stroke Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, ⁶Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ⁷Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States

Synopsis

Keywords: fMRI Acquisition, fMRI

Motivation: Neuronal activity induces vasodilation in local arterioles that propagates to upstream large arteries, but the furthest detectable arterial dilation from the site of neuronal activity remains unknown.

Goal(s): Detecting blood velocity responses at far upstream branches of the Posterior Cerebral Artery induced by a visual stimulus.

Approach: In this study, a functional phase-contrast MRA technique was combined with a commonly used block-design stimulation paradigm to detect blood velocity responses.

Results: About 10–20% velocity increases at the P2 segments of the Posterior Cerebral Artery were robustly observed.

Impact: We demonstrate that neuronal activity-induced velocity response can propagate to large feeding arteries 6–7 cm from the visual cortex. The spatial and temporal properties of this propagation are important for understanding neurovascular coupling, autoregulation, and human fMRI.

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