Cerebrospinal fluid volume analysis for hydrocephalus diagnosis and clinical research

Abstract In this paper we analyze volumes of the cerebrospinal fluid spaces for the diagnosis of hydrocephalus, which are served as reference values for future studies. We first present an automatic method to estimate those volumes from a new three-dimensional whole body magnetic resonance imaging sequence. This enables us to statistically analyze the fluid volumes, and to show that the ratio of subarachnoid volume to ventricular one is a proportionality constant for healthy adults (= 10.73), while in range [0.63, 4.61] for hydrocephalus patients. This indicates that a robust distinction between pathological and healthy cases can be achieved by using this ratio as an index.