Poe-Jou Chen1,2, A.r Gregory Sorensen1
1Athinoula A. Matinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, MGH, Charlestown, MA, USA; 2Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Instituite of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) is a non-invasive imaging technique that has the ability to study tumor vascular functions. It has been widely used for a range of clinical oncologic applications including cancer detection, grading, and evaluation of therapeutic response. A number of pharmacokinetic models have been proposed to characterize the signal intensity curve and associate it with the physiological condition in tumors. One of the distinct elements of pharmacokinetic modeling is the requirement of the time course of contrast agent concentration. However, a nonlinear relationship exists between the MR signal and contrast agent concentration for the most used spoiled gradient-echo (SPGR) pulse sequence for DCE MRI. T1 information is required for MR signal to be converted to contrast agent concentration. It is possible to assume the signal enhancement is linearly related to contrast agent concentration when and . The linear assumption is desirable since the T1 measurement is not always feasible in clinical setting. In this abstract, we will discuss the implication of this linear assumption in the regard of drug efficacy evaluation.