Measurement of changes in cerebrospinal fluid pulsation after traumatic brain injury using EPI-based functional MRI

Abstract

A recently-proposed method of simultaneous CSF pulsation and BOLD activity imaging was applied to the TBI-fMRI dataset. The CSF pulsation was significantly lower in the TBI group compared to that of healthy control group. The CSF pulsation decreased significantly in the first 6 months after TBI and then no significant changes in the later stage, which was consistent with previous studies, where CSF pulsation from TBI patients was lower than that of control subjects and starts to slowly recover thereafter. This study can be expanded to post-TBI fMRI datasets in general to examine functional activity and CSF pulsation simultaneously.