Thomas Gaass1,2,
Julien Dinkel3, Grzegorz Bauman2, Moritz Zaiss2,
Axel Haase1, Frederik Laun2
1Institute of
Medical Engineering, Technical University Munich, Munich, Germany; 2Division
of Medical Physics, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; 3Division
of Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
The accurate assessment of the pulmonary blood distribution is becoming increasingly important for specific diagnostic problems. Since the current standard clinically applied techniques pose an increased patient risk an alternative non-contrast-enhanced MRI method is highly desirable. The introduced novel technique (TCIR) uses a two-compartment model and inversion recovery with alternating inversion times to produce high resolution maps of the fractional pulmonary blood volume. The purpose of this work was to evaluate the reproducibility and sensitivity of TCIR. Comparing TCIR with dynamic contrast enhanced MRI, the feasibility of the proposed technique is additionally shown on a patient.