Multi-angle TOF MR brain angiography of the common marmoset

The relation between normal and pathological aging and the cerebrovascular component is still unclear. In this context, the common marmoset, which has the advantage of enabling longitudinal studies over a reasonable timeframe, appears as a good pre-clinical model. However, there is still a lack of quantitative information on the macrovascular structure of the marmoset brain. In this paper, we investigate the potentiality of multi-angle TOF MR angiography using a 3T MRI scanner to perform morphometric analysis of the marmoset brain vasculature. Our image processing pipeline greatly relies on the use of multiscale vesselness enhancement filters to help extract the 3D macrovasculature and perform subsequent morphometric calculations. Although multi-angle acquisition does not improve morphometric analysis significantly as compared to single-angle acquisition, it improves the network extraction by increasing the robustness of image processing algorithms.