Pulmonary Transit Time Can Be Accurately Quantified From Non-Arterial Input Function Series in First-Pass Cardiac...

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Imaging
• Medical Physics
• Radiology

Background:

• Pulmonary transit time (PTT) measurements in MRI perfusion typically require arterial input function (AIF) images.
• Signal saturation in AIF images can affect PTT accuracy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if PTT can be accurately measured using non-arterial input function (non-AIF) images.
• To evaluate PTT measurement using blood pool signals from myocardial enhancement during first-pass perfusion MRI.

Main Methods:

• Retrospective analysis of 108 patients undergoing resting first-pass perfusion MRI.
• Utilized radial perfusion and quantitative perfusion (qPerf) sequences.
• Developed an automated pipeline to compute PTT from AIF and non-AIF images using peak-to-peak, AUC-derived centroid, and curve-fitting centroid methods.

Main Results:

• Peak-to-peak PTT method showed wide limits of agreement.
• Centroid-based methods (AUC and curve-fitting) demonstrated low bias and narrower limits of agreement.
• Centroid methods provided precise and reliable PTT estimation across different perfusion sequences.

Conclusions:

• Pulmonary transit time (PTT) can be accurately derived from non-AIF images.
• AUC or curve-fitting centroid-to-centroid methods are suitable for PTT estimation without AIF.