Partial volume effects in dynamic contrast magnetic resonance renal studies

This is the first study of partial volume effect in quantifying renal function on dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging. Dynamic image data were acquired for a cohort of 10 healthy volunteers. Following respiratory motion correction, each voxel location was assigned a mixing vector representing the 'overspilling' contributions of each tissue due to the convolution action of the imaging system's point spread function. This was used to recover the true intensities associated with each constituent tissue. Thus, non-renal contributions from liver, spleen and other surrounding tissues could be eliminated from the observed time-intensity curves derived from a typical renal cortical region of interest. This analysis produced a change in the early slope of the renal curve, which subsequently resulted in an enhanced glomerular filtration rate estimate. This effect was consistently observed in a Rutland-Patlak analysis of the time-intensity data: the volunteer cohort produced a partial volume effect corrected mean enhancement of 36% in relative glomerular filtration rate with a mean improvement of 7% in r(2) fitting of the Rutland-Patlak model compared to the same analysis undertaken without partial volume effect correction. This analysis strongly supports the notion that dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging of kidneys is substantially affected by the partial volume effect, and that this is a significant obfuscating factor in subsequent glomerular filtration rate estimation.