Visual stimulus-evoked blood velocity responses in individual human posterior cerebral arteries measured with dynamic phase-contrast functional MR angiography

Functional MRI (fMRI) tracks brain activity through the associated hemodynamic changes via neurovascular coupling. Neurons communicate with the microvessels of the parenchyma to initiate a hemodynamic response, and these microvessels then communicate with upstream arterioles and arteries. The role of the larger feeding arteries--far upstream from the site of neuronal activity--in coordinating this response is incompletely understood, yet is important for the interpretation of fMRI. Functional Transcranial Doppler (fTCD) can noninvasively measure blood velocity changes in a subset of the largest macrovessels, albeit with poor spatial resolution, whereas existing functional MR angiography (fMRA) methods can assess blood velocity in mid-sized macrovessels but still lack the temporal resolution required to capture dynamic responses. This study aims to propose a new, quantitative fMRA method for measuring blood velocity responses in individual vessels in humans at high spatiotemporal resolution. A dynamic functional phase-contrast MRA approach was developed to quantify responses evoked by visual stimuli in the "P2" segment of the posterior cerebral artery (PCA), located [~]6 cm away from primary visual cortex. The achieved temporal resolution is comparable to that of conventional blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI, enabling block-design stimulation paradigms similar to those used in conventional fMRI studies. The temporal and spatial properties of the blood velocity responses were evaluated using both long- and short-duration visual stimuli presented to either the full visual field or a single hemifield. Robust responses were measured on both 3T and 7T clinical MRI scanners, and an approximately 3.3 {+/-} 1.2 cm/s increase in the blood velocity in the targeted segment was observed, which is roughly a 10% increase from baseline. Visual hemifield stimulation generated a measurable blood velocity response only in the contralateral cerebral hemisphere, indicating that systemic physiological changes occurring with stimulation cannot account for the observed response, suggesting that they instead reflect neurovascular coupling initiated in the visual cortex. The observed arterial blood velocity response is consistent with a downstream reduction in microvascular resistance and may represent a passive response rather than an active vessel dilation at the targeted arterial segment. The proposed method has the potential to extend the capability of commonly used approaches, such as fTCD, in clinical applications.