Greg O. Cron1, 2, Thanh B. Nguyen1, 2, Rebecca E. Thornhill1, 2, Jean-Francois Mercier1, Claire Foottit1, Carlos H. Torres1, 2, Santanu Chakraborty<s
1The Ottawa Hospital, Ottawa, ON, Canada; 2The University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
For DCE-MRI of cerebral gliomas, temporal resolution can be increased using 2D sequences with limited coverage. However, the resultant saturation and inflow effects distort the measured vascular input function (VIF). A relatively new way to solve this problem is phase-derived VIFs (VIFφ). The purpose of this study was to compare the reproducibility and diagnostic value of tracer kinetic parameters (TKPs) calculated with individually-measured VIFφ and a published population-averaged VIF (VIFpop), in a group of 31 patients. VIFφ was superior to VIFpop for TKP reproducibility. VIFφ- and VIFpop- derived TKPs were equally good at distinguishing low- from high- grade tumors.