Presurgical Visualization of Cerebral Surface Veins with Susceptibility Weighted Imaging

Introduction: The cerebral vascular architecture and in particular the geometrical relationship between pathologies and blood vessels are of tremendous diagnostic and therapeutic interest [1]. In particular, veins on the brain's surface can be used as landmarks since the spatial relationship between sulci and blood vessels is not altered by brain edema-shrinkage, or brain shift during surgery [2]. Magnetic resonance venography (MRV) based on a susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI) [3,4] allows us to visualize the intracranial venous vasculature at high spatial resolution without the use of a contrast agent. One drawback of SWI has been the poor visualization of veins at the brain's surface. We present an alternative data processing scheme and demonstrate visualization of surface veins based on SWI data.