One-third of brain MRI scans performed worldwide make use of gadolinium-based contrast agent injections to enable detection of the breakdown in the blood brain barrier by the resulting enhancement. Observations have shown increased signal intensity particularly in the globus pallidus and thalamus after multiple doses of linear contrast agents but there is no standard procedure to measure this contrast intensity. Current quantitative methods are manual, labor intensive, time-consuming and provide variable results.
We present a fully automatic workflow which accelerates the investigation of signal intensity in these nuclei after multiple doses of contrast agents by extracting the T1-weighted modal intensity value and applying appropriate corrections and normalizations to allow comparison across acquisitions and protocols. Automatic results matched up to 94% correlation with manual results and reduced the time by 90%.
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