Abstract #1734

Quantitative Analysis of Clinical Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) to Evaluate Treatment Response in Human Breast Cancer

Yanming Yu^1,2, Jun Li¹, Quan Jiang³, Shanglian Bao¹, Yi Zhong⁴, Yongquan Ye², Jiong Zhu⁵, Yongming Dai⁶, Ewart Mark Haacke², Jiani Hu²

¹Beijing key lab of medical physics and engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China; ²Department of Radiology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, United States; ³Department of Neurology, Henry Ford Health Sciences Center, Detroit, MI, United States; ⁴4. Sino-Dutch Biomedical & Information Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China; ⁵Department of Radiology, Ren Ji Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai; ⁶Healthcare, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Siemens Ltd. China, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

There are several practical limitations in quantitative analysis of clinical DCE-MRI for assessing treatment response, including: 1) difficulty in obtaining an accurate arterial input function (AIF); 2) the long scanning time to accurately estimate baseline T1(0); and 3) often highly variable or unphysical results due to noise effects; 4) long computational time. We develop a method that combines a fixed-T1, the Fuzzy C-Means and the reference region model to overcome the aforementioned limitations in quantitative analysis of clinical DCE-MRI without measuring either an AIF or T1(0), and demonstrate its feasibility to assess neoadjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer using clinical DCE-MRI.