Whole-Brain CBF Measurements using DCE-MRI & 3D k-t PCA

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

T1-weighted dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MRI has emerged as a promising technique for quantifying cerebral blood flow (CBF) and other vascular properties. However, the clinical feasibility of DCE-MRI perfusion imaging is currently limited by low SNR and poor spatial coverage. The recently proposed k-t PCA technique allows a considerable data reduction in dynamic MRI by jointly exploiting the separation of the aliased signals in x-f space and the sparsity of dynamic data when subjected to principal component analysis (PCA).This paper investigates the quality of whole-brain CBF measurements using DCE-MRI and 3D k-t PCA with 20 slices.