Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, September 24, 2012
Hepatic Perfusion Modeling Using Time-Resolved 3D Radial DCE-MRI: Quantitative and Semi-Quantitative Approaches
Eric Bultman (student of Drs. Walter Block and Scott Reeder)
Research Assistant, Department of Medical Physics, UW-School of Medicine & Public Health, Madison, WI - USA -
Dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI remains the clinical gold standard for detection of focal liver lesions such as hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, the low temporal resolution of commercial DCE-MRI sequences (12-20 s/frame) makes perfusion modeling impractical – both high temporal resolution (< 3-4 s/frame) and high spatial resolution (< 1 cm3) are required to capture the enhancement dynamics of HCC lesions. In this work, we have utilized a 3D radial sequence with 2 mm isotropic spatial resolution and true 4s temporal footprint to image 12 healthy volunteers and 11 patients with known HCC. After retrospectively identifying breath-hold periods from respiratory bellows data, time-signal curves for each voxel were fit to quantitative and semi-quantitative perfusion models. The results of this study demonstrate the feasibility of hepatic perfusion modeling in the context of missing data due to free-breathing, as well as the value of semi-quantitative perfusion models in the presence of significant stochastic and physiologic noise.