Marijn van Stralen1,
Hanke J. Schalkx2, Harrit W. Mulder1, Kenneth
Coenegrachts3, Maarten S. van Leeuwen2, Wouter B.
Veldhuis2, Josien P.W. Pluim1
1Image
Sciences Institute, UMC Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands; 2Radiology,
UMC Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands; 3Radiology, AZ
St.‐Jan Brugge‐Oostende AV, Brugge, West-Vlaanderen,
Belgium
Recent developments have enabled high-resolution dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) of the entire liver. However, breathing and other organ motion hampers the current clinical use of DCE-MRI for perfusion analysis. Moreover, intensity change as a result of contrast perfusion challenges existing motion correction techniques. We propose a temporally consistent motion compensation method based on the integrated 3D + time alignment of the gradient magnitude of the image intensity. It is shown that time-consistent non-rigid registration outperforms temporal independent registration by measuring surface errors on manual liver segmentations. These results promise improved perfusion analysis (eg. pharmacokinetic modeling) of abdominal organs using DCE-MRI.