Saeed Kiani1, Isky Gordon2,
Iosif Mendichovszky3, Marica Cutajar2, Kevin Wells1
1CVSSP, Faculty of
Engineering & Physical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey,
United Kingdom; 2UCL Institute of Child Health, London, United
Kingdom; 3Wolfson Molecular Imaging Centre, University of
Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
Robustness of DCE-MRI renography in the presence of diminished renal function needs to be addressed. Renal impairment may result in uptake reduction of the contrast agent (Gd-DTPA) and subsequently signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) reduction in the DCE-MR image data. This work aims to evaluate the robustness of DCE-MRI renography in the presence of synthetic SNR variation on the renal data. The synthetic SNR variation is achieved by degrading the data in both spatial and temporal domains. The results demonstrated substantial variations (i.e. >10%) in estimated kidney filtration rates (GFR) for a slight variation of SNR, about 0.05-0.1, from the original data.