I don't see the value in this study. Breathing affects the MR imaging of the cerebrospinal venous flow....so what can anyone do about that?The introduction of the CCSVI hypothesis in the diagnosis of MS has recently caused interest in intra- and extracranial venous flow measurements (1). Due to structural complexity and individual variations, flow studies in cerebrospinal veins using phase-contrast (PC) MR are rarely conducted (2). Though it has long been confirmed a source of variability in venous drainage to the heart (3), respiratory motion effects have been largely ignored in PC-MR, partially due to the difficulty and longer scan times of gating the respiratory and cardiac cycles. The purpose of this pilot study was to implement a dual-gated PC-MR sequence and investigate the effect of respiratory motion during free breathing on cerebrospinal venous flow.
Clinically, MR imaging does not seem to be as useful or easy as doppler imaging.