Making Slow Physiologic Dynamics Visible with MRI

Slow, spatially complex motion and transport in the body play central roles in health and disease. Yet these dynamics remain difficult to measure non-invasively because they occur in small or geometrically complex regions, or are too slow and become buried under larger physiological fluctuations. To address this, we developed a contrast-free MRI method that uses water as an endogenous tracer and Fourier encoding to resolve where signal originates over short (10 ms) to long (3 s) evolution times, effectively mapping sources in reverse. In this talk, I will introduce the method and demonstrate applications across multiple slow-flow regimes, including cerebral venous flow and cerebrospinal fluid motion, then establish sensitivity to global physiologic modulation and specificity to repeatable local modulation during neural activation.

Register at weblink to attend in person or online.

Speaker: Ekin Karasan, UC Berkeley