Application of PLS-DA Method in Separation of Venous and Arterial Phase in 4D CE-MRA Data

Siamak Salari Sharif¹, Ewart Mark Haacke¹, Joseph J. Hewett², Michael Arata²

In contrast-enhanced MR-angiography (CE-MRA), often, it is desired to extract a single phase; venous or arterial, for further processing or visualization. This task can be very complicated especially in patients with venous abnormalities as the flow is accompanied with various delays or is obstructed, leading to inability to identify a clear arterial phase in the image for subtraction. Therefore, we developed an algorithm based on partial least-squares discriminant analysis to isolate the venous/arterial phase in 4D CE-MRA. The advantage of our method is its ability to handle highly correlated MRI datasets, as well as capturing the variability in contrast enhancement.