Preliminary Evaluation of the Short Term Reproducibility of Dynamic Contrast Enhanced (DCE) MRI in Patients with Carotid Atherosclerosis

Claudia Calcagno¹, Venkatesh Mani¹, Sarayu Ramachandran¹, Silvia Aguiar¹, John Postley², Zahi A. Fayad¹

Dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MRI can quantify plaque inflammation in atherosclerosis, however its reproducibility is still unknown. We present a preliminary study of the inter-scan reproducibility of the area under the curve (AUC) of contrast agent uptake calculated from DCE-MRI acquisitions in patients with carotid atherosclerosis. We show excellent reproducibility of plaque AUC relative to ipsi-lateral sternocleidomastoideal muscle AUC (ICC respectively 0.972 and 0.755, p<0.05). This preliminary study show encouraging results and suggests that DCE-MRI could be a useful tool for the clinical evaluation of human atherosclerosis and/or in longitudinal clinical drug trials.