Susceptibility changes and resulting B0 changes during the respiratory cycle lead to phase variations in cerebrospinal fluid phase-contrast flow measurements and might be erroneously misinterpreted as physiological flow changes. These B0 changes were analysed by acquiring flow compensated and flow encoded real-time, single-shot EPI images. The respiration-induced phase variations in phase-contrast images were found to depend on the magnetic field strength, the delay between the flow compensated and flow encoded images and the depth and frequency of respiration. Thus, respiration-induced B0 variations need to be corrected prior to analysing true respiration-dependent cerebrospinal fluid flow measured by real-time phase-contrast MRI.
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