Slice-accelerated gradient-echo echo planar imaging dynamic susceptibility contrast-enhanced MRI with blipped CAIPI:...

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Neuroimaging
• Quantitative MRI

Background:

• Dynamic susceptibility contrast-enhanced (DSC) MRI is crucial for assessing brain perfusion.
• Temporal resolution is a critical factor influencing the accuracy of DSC-MRI perfusion parameters.
• Simultaneous-multi-slice (SMS) acquisition techniques offer potential for improving temporal resolution in MRI.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the impact of high temporal resolution on perfusion measurements.
• To assess the effect of temporal resolution on the image quality of perfusion maps.
• To investigate the utility of SMS acquisition in DSC-MRI for enhanced perfusion analysis.

Main Methods:

• Retrospective analysis of DSC-MRI data from 10 healthy subjects.
• Synthesizing data sets with temporal resolutions of 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 seconds from 0.5-second raw data.
• Quantifying cerebral blood flow (CBF), cerebral blood volume, mean transit time (MTT), time to peak (TTP), and Tmax.
• Visual assessment of perfusion map quality.

Main Results:

• Significant differences in CBF, MTT, and TTP values were observed at 1.5 and 2.0-second temporal resolutions compared to the 0.5-second reference.
• Image quality of MTT, TTP, and Tmax maps degraded as temporal resolution decreased.
• SMS DSC-MRI demonstrated potential for maintaining or improving map quality.

Conclusions:

• Temporal resolution critically influences quantitative perfusion parameters derived from DSC-MRI.
• Lower temporal resolutions lead to a decline in the diagnostic quality of perfusion maps.
• SMS DSC-MRI holds promise for optimizing image quality in perfusion mapping, particularly for MTT, TTP, and Tmax.