A framework for Fourier-decomposition free-breathing pulmonary ¹ H MRI ventilation measurements

To develop a rapid Fourier decomposition (FD) free-breathing pulmonary ¹ H MRI (FDMRI) image processing and biomarker pipeline for research use.

We acquired MRI in 20 asthmatic subjects using a balanced steady-state free precession (bSSFP) sequence optimized for ventilation imaging. 2D ¹ H MRI series were segmented by enforcing the spatial similarity between adjacent images and the right-to-left lung volume-ratio. The segmented lung series were co-registered using a coarse-to-fine deformable registration framework that used dual optimization techniques. All pairwise registrations were implemented in parallel and FD was performed to generate 2D ventilation-weighted maps and ventilation-defect-percent (VDP). Lung segmentation and registration accuracy were evaluated by comparing algorithm and manual lung-masks, deformed manual lung-masks, and fiducials in the moving and fixed images using Dice-similarity-coefficient (DSC), mean-absolute-distance (MAD), and target-registration-error (TRE). The relationship of FD-VDP and ³ He-VDP was evaluated using the Pearson-correlation-coefficient (r) and Bland Altman analysis. Algorithm reproducibility was evaluated using the coefficient-of-variation (CoV) and intra-class-correlation-coefficient (ICC) for segmentation, registration, and FD-VDP components.

For lung segmentation, there was a DSC of 95 ± 1.5% and MAD of 2.3 ± 0.5 mm, and for registration there was a DSC of 97 ± 0.8%, MAD of 1.6 ± 0.4 mm and TRE of 3.6 ± 1.2 mm. Reproducibility for segmentation DSC (CoV/ICC = 0.5%/0.92), registration TRE (CoV/ICC = 0.4%/0.98), and FD-VDP (Cov/ICC = 3.9%/0.97) was high. The pipeline required 10 min/subject. FD-VDP was correlated with ³ He-VDP (r = 0.69, P < 0.001) although there was a bias toward lower FD-VDP (bias = -4.9%).

We developed and evaluated a pipeline that provides a rapid and precise method for FDMRI ventilation maps.