A Reproducibility Study in PAD Patient Plaque Burden Analysis Approach with Multi-Contrast Weighting MRI

Dongxiang Xu¹, Aaron Black², Yihua Liao², Timothy Carroll², Debiao Li², James Carr², Chun Yuan, Mary M. McDermott²

In a long term, large PAD clinical trial, the reproducibility of MRI based plaque burden evaluation is very important to the success of study. To evaluate the reliability of multi contrast MR imaging technique on femoral artery, two variability studies on a subset of trial data were conducted. The statistical analysis on quantitative plaque measurements demonstrated that reproducibility of MR imaging is satisfactory in PAD study. Using this technique can also help reduce the Inter-Reader variability in follow up plaque analysis. This means that current techniques used in MR imaging and plaque burden analysis can provide effective and reliable quantitative measurements for peripheral arterial disease evaluation.