Oh yeah, feel that beat, brainy!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
The blood vessels in your brain expand and contract to the beat of your heart. This is called arterial pulsation and it’s measured to study heart health.
But! Methods for measuring it are either inaccurate or invasive. Enter Fanhua Guo and team from USC.
They used harmless magnetic fields to map how volumes of blood in brain vessels change over time. This let them accurately measure arterial pulsation.
These safe brain snapshots could help doctors monitor aging and diagnose diseases.
So shimmy on, blood vessels — be good with your bad selves! Oh yeah!
Reference: Guo, F., Zhao, C., Shou, Q., Jin, N., Jann, K., Shao, X., & Wang, D. J. (2025). Assessing cerebral microvascular volumetric with high-resolution 4D cerebral blood volume MRI at 7 T. Nature Cardiovascular Research, 4(10), 1424–1438. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44161-025-00722-1