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Updated: May 27, 2026

Point-of-Care Kidney and Genitourinary Ultrasound in Adults: Image Acquisition
Published on: June 21, 2024
DCE-MRI of the human kidney using BLADE: a feasibility study in healthy volunteers
Florian Lietzmann1, Frank G Zöllner, Ulrike I Attenberger
1Computer Assisted Clinical Medicine, Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany. florian.lietzmann@medma.uni-heidelberg.de
Purpose:
To evaluate the degree of motion compensation in the kidney using two different sampling methods, each in their optimized settings: A BLADE k-space acquisition technique and a routinely used kidney perfusion acquisition scheme (TurboFLASH).
Materials And Methods:
Dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance examinations were performed in 16 healthy volunteers on a 3 Tesla MR-system with two parameterizations of the BLADE sequence and the standard reference acquisition scheme. Signal intensity enhanced time curves were analyzed with a mathematical model and a widely published separable compartment model on cortex regions to assess robustness versus motion artifacts.
Results:
BLADE-measurements with a strip-width of 32 lines constituted the smallest mean values for the sum of squared errors (6065 ± 4996) compared with the measurement with a strip-width of 64 lines (13849 ± 14079) or the standard TurboFLASH (11884 ± 8076). Calculations concerning goodness of the fit of the applied compartment model yielded an overall average of the Akaike Fit Error of 732 ± 141 for BLADE (646 ± 149 for a strip-width of 32 lines, 816 ± 53 for 64 lines) and 1626 ± 303 for the TurboFLASH (TFL) sequence.
Conclusion:
We demonstrated that renal dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging using BLADE k-space sampling with a strip-width of 32 is significantly less sensitive to motion than a widely published Turbo-Flash sequence with nearly similar parameters.
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