Comparison of Baseline Signal Correction Methods for Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI

Yiqun Xue¹, Mark A. Rosen¹, Hee Kwon Song¹

In DCE-MRI, perfusion parameters are particularly sensitive to the accuracy of the baseline (pre-contrast) signal of the AIF and tumor. However, the SNR of the pre-contrast data can be very low, particularly at high spatial resolutions since the T1 of blood and tissue are much longer than the TR. In this abstract, we compare three different baseline correction methods: magnitude averaging, Rician correction and complex averaging. It is shown that with sufficient amount of baseline data, measurement errors due to noise can be reduced most effectively by averaging of the complex data.