Accuracy of Cerebral Blood Flow Measurements in Accelerated Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI Using k-T SENSE

Henrik Pedersen¹, Adam Espe Hansen¹, Henrik B.W. Larsson¹

Dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MRI represents an attractive technique for quantifying cerebral blood flow (CBF). However, the inherent slow nature of DCE-MRI currently prohibits whole-head imaging of CBF. This study investigates how different degrees of data reduction obtained with k-t SENSE influence CBF measurements in the brain. The results suggest that the optimum combination of training data size and acceleration factor is 11 training profiles and 8x acceleration, resulting in a net acceleration factor of 4.6. In practise, this allows increasing the spatial coverage of DCE-MRI from 4 slices with SENSE to 10 slices with k-t SENSE.