Artificial intelligence velocimetry reveals in vivo flow rates, pressure gradients, and shear stresses in murine perivascular flows

Abstract

Quantifying the flow of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is crucial for understanding brain waste clearance and nutrient delivery, as well as edema in pathological conditions such as stroke. However, existing in vivo techniques are limited to sparse velocity measurements in pial perivascular spaces (PVSs) or low-resolution measurements from brain-wide imaging. Additionally, volume flow rate, pressure, and shear stress variation in PVSs are essentially impossible to measure in vivo. Here, we show that artificial intelligence velocimetry (AIV) can integrate sparse velocity measurements with physics-informed neural networks to quantify CSF flow in PVSs. With AIV, we infer three-dimensional (3D), high-resolution velocity, pressure, and shear stress. Validation comes from training with 70% of PTV measurements and demonstrating close agreement with the remaining 30%. A sensitivity analysis on the AIV inputs shows that the uncertainty in AIV inferred quantities due to uncertainties in the PVS boundary locations inherent to in vivo imaging is less than 30%, and the uncertainty from the neural net initialization is less than 1%. In PVSs of N = 4 wild-type mice we find mean flow speed 16.33 ± 11.09 µm/s, volume flow rate 2.22 ± 1.983 × 10 3 µm 3 /s, axial pressure gradient ( − 2.75 ± 2.01)×10 −4 Pa/µm (−2.07 ± 1.51 mmHg/m), and wall shear stress (3.00 ± 1.45)×10 −3 Pa (all mean ± SE). Pressure gradients, flow rates, and resistances agree with prior predictions. AIV infers in vivo PVS flows in remarkable detail, which will improve fluid dynamic models and potentially clarify how CSF flow changes with aging, Alzheimer’s disease, and small vessel disease.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Mar 29, 2023
Source ID
10.1073/pnas.2217744120

Entities

People

  • Antonio Ladrón-de-Guevara
  • Douglas H Kelley
  • George Karniadakis
  • Jiatong Sun
  • John H Thomas
  • Kimberly A Stevens
  • Maiken Nedergaard
  • Shengze Cai
  • Ting Du
  • Xiaoning Zheng

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • Brown University
  • Jinan University
  • National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health
  • National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
  • United States Army
  • University of Rochester
  • Zhejiang University

Tags

Readers

  • Cardiovascular Physiology
  • Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics.
  • Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Cognitive Aging in the Guam and Border Populations Affected by Alzheimer's Disease and Tau-Associated Dementias.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Bayesian Inference
  • Space
  • Space - Hall-Effect Thruster