Catching the Flow

Your memories, perception and thoughts all exist in your neocortex, grooved tissue that comprises over three-quarters of your brain. Its only blood supply comes from the pial arterial vasculature, a network of tiny blood vessels that are difficult to image in detail. Although blood vessels have been successfully imaged at high resolution using live, time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography (TOF-MRA) – an approach that detects the flow of water protons in blood – it was ruled out for pial arteries due to their slow blood flow; until now. Researchers successfully imaged the pial arteries of four adults with TOF-MRA by using extremely small voxels – voxels are the 3D equivalent of pixels and refer to cubes of space. The resulting high-resolution images (pictured) captured pial arteries down to one voxel in diameter. TOF-MRA, therefore, wasn't limited by slow blood flow but by image resolution and can now be used in pial vasculature studies.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Video by Saskia Bollmann and colleagues
• Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, April 2022