Myocardial Blood Flow Estimates Depend on the Location of the Arterial Input Function Within the Cardiac Cycle in First-Pass DCE-MRI Studies of Myocardial Perfusion

Aleksandra Radjenovic^1,2, John Biglands¹, Abdulghani Larghat¹, John Ridgway¹, John Greenwood¹, Sven Plein¹

In this study, we analysed the systematic differences between left ventricular arterial input function (AIF) curves acquired in different parts of the cardiac cycle, and assessed the impact of these differences on the estimated values of myocardial blood flow (MBF) in 17 healthy volunteers. Diastolic AIF precedes the systolic AIF at rest and stress, and diastolic AIF is more compact (with higher amplitude and shorter time to peak). Consequently, there is a significant variation between MBFs estimated using diastolic or systolic AIF: the use of diastolic AIF yields consistently lower MBF values. When reporting MBF values in the literature, the details of the AIF used for deconvolution should be reported too, to enable direct cross-study comparisons.