Assessment of Uncertainty in the Estimation of Pharmacokinetic Model Parameters for DCE-MRI Data Analysis

Jin Zhang¹, Sungheon Kim¹

Due to lack of gold standard to measure pharmacokinetic model parameters, it remains uncertain how accurately these model parameters represent the tissue microenvironment. Recently pharmacokinetic models with inter-compartmental water exchange effects have been introduced. However, it has not been shown how reliably the parameter estimation can be done with such models with additional parameters for water exchange. Hence, we investigated the influence of initial values and noise on the model parameter estimation with simulated MRI data. Our results demonstrate that numerical simulation studies can be used to assess the accuracy and precision in the model parameter estimation.