Semiautomated ROI analysis in dynamic MR studies. Part II: Application to renal function examination

Fast MR techniques and the application of water-soluble contrast agents allow the simultaneous examination of renal morphology and the functional aspects of glomerular filtration using bolus injections of Gd-DTPA. Spatial resolution is sufficient to resolve individual renal pyramids, but the quantitative examination of regions of interest (ROIs) is severely impeded by organ movements due to variations of the end-inspiratory position. A new image-processing scheme has been used and tested in 23 normal volunteers and patients. This scheme replaces a tedious frame-by-frame ROI analysis by positional correction of renal regions of all frames of the sequence such that the definition of the regions has to be performed only once. The signal intensities (SIs) of the local regions in each frame are used to compute statistics and to generate curves representing local temporal SI changes due to contrast agent excretion. The success rate of the procedure depends largely on the image quality and on the adherence to a proved acquisition protocol. The present article shows that the combination of MR and robust and reliable image-processing methods can be important for the highly automated analysis of a large number of images acquired as dynamic studies.