Evaluation of Reproducibility of Measured Arterial Input Functions and DCE-MRI Derived Model Estimates Obtained Using Either Pre-Bolus Individual AIFs or Population Derived AIFs

Mihaela Rata¹, David Collins¹, James Darcy¹, Christina Messiou¹, Nina Tunariu¹, Martin Leach¹, Nandita Desouza¹, Matthew Orton¹

Dynamic contrast enhanced MRI requires an estimate/measurement of the arterial input function (AIF) to derive pharmacokinetic parameters. This study investigated a cohort of 21 patients, evaluating the usefulness of measured patient specific AIFs as derived from pre-bolus compared with a population-based averaged AIF. The variation of extracted AIFs was explored over 3 vertical segments of the aorta in order to define the most reproducible region. The reproducibility of the pharmacokinetic parameter Ktrans was measured using various AIFs. The results suggest no improvement of the study reproducibility when using the individual AIF derived from coronal pre-bolus data.