Assessment of Bowel Inflammation in Crohns Disease by Using Quantitative Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI

Aytekin Oto¹, Xiaobing Fan¹, Devkumar Mustafi¹, Gregory S. Karczmar¹, David T. Rubin²

MRI has recently emerged as a valuable tool in detection of bowel abnormalities and evaluation of Crohn`s disease. To evaluate the feasibility of quantitative analysis of dynamic contrast enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) in detection of bowel inflammation in patients with Crohn`s disease, we analyzed DCE-MRI data based on a two-compartmental pharmacokinetic model and semi-quantitative parameters derived from an empirical mathematical model. The results demonstrated that inflamed bowel segments had faster transfer rate, larger extravascular extracellular space volume, higher contrast uptake, larger value of initial area under the curve, and steeper enhancement slope than normal bowel.