Developing a quality control protocol for diffusion imaging on a clinical MRI system

This work describes the development of a quality control protocol, which can be implemented to assess the accuracy, precision and reproducibility of the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) measurement on a clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system. The precision and accuracy of the ADC measurement are analysed with regard to MRI system noise, signal reproducibility and differences between nominal and effective b values. Two aqueous test-solutions of CuSO4 and sucrose are prepared for the quality control protocol. ADC measurement with the CuSO4 solution is more sensitive to differences between nominal and effective b values, on account of the solution's high ADC. ADC measurement with the sucrose solution is more sensitive to signal reproducibility due to the solution's low baseline signal intensity. The ADC of the test-solutions is measured on an MRI system at our centre with a sequence used for clinical studies using diffusion imaging. Two parameters, Q and R, are defined for the analysis of the quality control ADC values. The Q parameter is the ratio of the standard deviation of the quality control mean ADC values over time to the optimal standard deviation, as derived from the effect of thermal noise on the ADC measurement uncertainty. Analysis with the Q parameter indicates that signal reproducibility errors contribute to ADC variations on our MRI system when imaging with high b values (b > 500 mm s(-2)), whereas differences between nominal and effective b values have a greater impact on the ADC measurement when imaging with low b values (b < 500 mm s(-2)). The R parameter is defined as the ratio of the directional variation of the ADC quality control values to the uncertainty of the ADC measurement. Analysis with the R parameter shows that the effect of directional variation of the ADC measurement on our MRI system is more pronounced when imaging with low b values. The quality control protocol identified a systematic error, which introduced a small system-induced anisotropy in the ADC measurement. This error is currently taken into account in the analysis of clinical studies employing the diffusion imaging sequence used in this quality control protocol.