Abdominal DCE-MRI reconstruction with deformable motion correction for liver perfusion quantification.

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Radiology
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• Abdominal dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI is prone to motion artifacts, blurring images and distorting uptake curves.
• Rigid-body motion correction (RMC) improves liver perfusion analysis by restoring portal-venous input functions (PVIF) but cannot correct for breathing-induced liver deformation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and evaluate a novel reconstruction algorithm with deformable motion correction (DMC) for whole-abdomen breathing-induced motion.
• To assess the impact of DMC on image quality and perfusion quantification in abdominal DCE-MRI.

Main Methods:

• A golden-angle stack-of-stars gradient-echo sequence was used for DCE-MRI data acquisition in 54 examinations.
• A respiratory motion signal extracted from data was used to reconstruct 21 breathing states, aligned via deformable image registration.
• DMC was applied by correcting back-projection images before reconstruction; results were compared to uncorrected and RMC images.

Main Results:

• DMC significantly increased PVIF peak amplitude versus uncorrected images (8% increase) but not versus RMC.
• DMC led to a significant decrease in estimated liver perfusion (8 ml/(100 ml·min)) compared to uncorrected images.
• DMC reduced artifacts in perfusion maps and blurred liver tumors.

Conclusions:

• DCE-MRI reconstruction with DMC effectively corrects motion-distorted uptake curves and reduces artifacts in abdominal images and parameter maps.
• DMC does not offer significant advantages over RMC for liver perfusion quantification.