Meningeal lymphatic vessels in the human head: Examples of in vivo visualization with high-resolution 3T MRI

In 2015, meningeal lymphatic vessels (mLVs) were (re)discovered in mice and human dura specimens. Two years later, the first report was published showing that mLVs can be detected in humans in vivo by high-resolution 3 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In 2017 and 2018, two further studies reported the successful MRI-based detection of mLVs in vivo in humans. The aim of our study was to provide further evidence of the possibility to detect mLVs in vivo with MRI in humans. To this end, MR images already available from one subject (the first author) were analyzed. We detected mLVs in the coronal plane at the bilateral superior lateral corners of the superior sagittal sinus (SSS) as well as below the SSS, in agreement with the two other published reports about the in vivo detection of mLVS in humans with MRI. Our report is thus, to the best of our knowledge, the fourth published report about in vivo MR imaging of human mLVs.