MRI Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about MRI, including details on magnetic resonance imaging, neuroimaging, brain tumors.

Tracer kinetic model-driven registration for dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI time-series data.

Buonaccorsi GA, O'Connor JP, Caunce A, Roberts C, Cheung S, Watson Y, Davies K, Hope L, Jackson A, Jayson GC, Parker GJ

Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. giob@manchester.ac.uk

Dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) time series data are subject to unavoidable physiological motion during acquisition (e.g., due to breathing) and this motion causes significant errors when fitting tracer kinetic models to the data, particularly with voxel-by-voxel fitting approaches. Motion correction is problematic, as contrast enhancement introduces new features into postcontrast images and conventional registration similarity measures cannot fully account for the increased image information content. A methodology is presented for tracer kinetic model-driven registration that addresses these problems by explicitly including a model of contrast enhancement in the registration process. The iterative registration procedure is focused on a tumor volume of interest (VOI), employing a three-dimensional (3D) translational transformation that follows only tumor motion. The implementation accurately removes motion corruption in a DCE-MRI software phantom and it is able to reduce model fitting errors and improve localization in 3D parameter maps in patient data sets that were selected for significant motion problems. Sufficient improvement was observed in the modeling results to salvage clinical trial DCE-MRI data sets that would otherwise have to be rejected due to motion corruption.

Published 5 November 2007 in Magn Reson Med, 58(5): 1010-9.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2005-2008 MRI Research Today. All Rights Reserved.