A dedicated arterial input function compensating for inflow and partial voluming in dynamic contrast enhanced MRI

Both inflow and partial volume effects (PVE) are sources of error when measuring the arterial input function (AIF) in DCE-MRI. We proposed a method that estimated the perceived pulse number of spins, and then corrected with these such that both effects were simultaneously compensated. Simulation data demonstrated that the reconstructed AIFs showed only marginal bias. In addition, the algorithm yielded highly correlated reconstructed curves over a wide range of PVEs in clinical data. Our findings show that the PVE can be compensated by considering it as part of the inflow correction as it exhibits similar confounding effects when measuring DCE-AIFs.