Assessment of Inflammation in a Rabbit Model of Early Atherosclerosis: Reproducibility and Accuracy of Kinetic Analysis Approaches with Black-Blood DCE-MRI

Huijun Chen¹, Jinhui Shen¹, William S. Kerwin¹

DCE-MRI has been shown to be sensitive to inflammatory content within plaque. Previous bright-blood technique is not compatible with early lesions due to the enhancement contamination from lumen. Recently, the area under enhancement curve (AUC) has been found to be associated with neovessels in early atherosclerosis by black-blood imaging. In this study, we demonstrated the potential for kinetic modeling of black blood DCE-MRI of atherosclerotic plaque using a reference region approach to the Patlak model. Using an animal model of early atherosclerosis, both kinetic parameters exhibited better reproducibility and stronger correlation with inflammatory bio-markers than the AUC ratio.