Significant Improvement in Reproducibility of DCE-MRI Achieved using Cardiac-Output Based Constraint of Arterial Input Function

Jeff Lei Zhang¹, Henry Rusinek¹, Umer Khan¹, Pippa Storey¹, David Stoffel¹, Qun Chen¹, Vivian S. Lee¹

This study examines the utility of the cardiac-output (CO) constraint in correcting for arterial input function. We performed repeated DCE-MRI exams in the same individual, each with individual CO measurement. Results showed that the approach effectively reduced the intra-scan variability in AIF due to inflow effect and thus improved the precision of GFR and RPF. As the method deals with tracer concentration, it is capable of handling data from different imaging sequences (2D and 3D FLASH in this study), and is expected to work well on other sequence such as dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) T2*-weighted imaging.