Hassan Bagher-Ebadian1, 2, Siamak P. Nejad-Davarani1, 3, Rajan Jain4, Douglas Noll3, Quan Jiang1, 2, Ali Syed Arbab4, Tom Mikkelsen5, James R. Ewing
1Neurology, Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, MI, United States; 2Physics, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, United States; 3Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States; 4Radiology, Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, MI, United States; 5Neurosurgery, Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, MI, United States
In Dynamic Contrast Enhanced (DCE- MRI) studies, pharmacokinetic models rely on converting the time course of the signal intensity to changes in the longitudinal relaxation rate, ΔR1(t). However, many researchers employ the normalized Signal Intensity, for quantitative and semi-quantitative DCE analyses instead of ΔR1(t). In this study, one-dimensional error propagation is applied to the previously described analytical approach in order to investigate the difference between ΔR1(t) and normalized signal intensity profiles. A full analytical methodology is presented for quantifying and comparing the level of agreement in the profiles in both techniques for different levels of contrast enhancement ratios.