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Ariyurek C, Koçanaoğulları A, Afacan O, Kurugol S. Motion-compensated image reconstruction for improved kidney function assessment using dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI. NMR IN BIOMEDICINE 2024; 37:e5116. [PMID: 38359842 DOI: 10.1002/nbm.5116] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/19/2023] [Revised: 12/08/2023] [Accepted: 01/15/2024] [Indexed: 02/17/2024]
Abstract
Accurately measuring renal function is crucial for pediatric patients with kidney conditions. Traditional methods have limitations, but dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) provides a safe and efficient approach for detailed anatomical evaluation and renal function assessment. However, motion artifacts during DCE-MRI can degrade image quality and introduce misalignments, leading to unreliable results. This study introduces a motion-compensated reconstruction technique for DCE-MRI data acquired using golden-angle radial sampling. Our proposed method achieves three key objectives: (1) identifying and removing corrupted data (outliers) using a Gaussian process model fitting with a k -space center navigator, (2) efficiently clustering the data into motion phases and performing interphase registration, and (3) utilizing a novel formulation of motion-compensated radial reconstruction. We applied the proposed motion correction (MoCo) method to DCE-MRI data affected by varying degrees of motion, including both respiratory and bulk motion. We compared the outcomes with those obtained from the conventional radial reconstruction. Our evaluation encompassed assessing the quality of images, concentration curves, and tracer kinetic model fitting, and estimating renal function. The proposed MoCo reconstruction improved the temporal signal-to-noise ratio for all subjects, with a 21.8% increase on average, while total variation values of the aorta, right, and left kidney concentration were improved for each subject, with 32.5%, 41.3%, and 42.9% increases on average, respectively. Furthermore, evaluation of tracer kinetic model fitting indicated that the median standard deviation of the estimated filtration rate (σ F T ), mean normalized root-mean-squared error (nRMSE), and chi-square goodness-of-fit of tracer kinetic model fit were decreased from 0.10 to 0.04, 0.27 to 0.24, and, 0.43 to 0.27, respectively. The proposed MoCo technique enabled more reliable renal function assessment and improved image quality for detailed anatomical evaluation in the case of bulk and respiratory motion during the acquisition of DCE-MRI.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cemre Ariyurek
- Quantitative Intelligent Imaging Lab (QUIN), Department of Radiology, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
| | - Aziz Koçanaoğulları
- Quantitative Intelligent Imaging Lab (QUIN), Department of Radiology, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
| | - Onur Afacan
- Quantitative Intelligent Imaging Lab (QUIN), Department of Radiology, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
| | - Sila Kurugol
- Quantitative Intelligent Imaging Lab (QUIN), Department of Radiology, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
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Wu M, Zhang JL. MR Perfusion Imaging for Kidney Disease. Magn Reson Imaging Clin N Am 2024; 32:161-170. [PMID: 38007278 DOI: 10.1016/j.mric.2023.09.004] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/27/2023]
Abstract
Renal perfusion reflects overall function of a kidney. As an important indicator of kidney diseases, renal perfusion can be noninvasively measured by multiple methods of MR imaging, such as dynamic contrast-enhanced MR imaging, intravoxel incoherent motion analysis, and arterial spin labeling method. In this article we introduce the principle of the methods, review their recent technical improvements, and then focus on summarizing recent applications of the methods in assessing various renal diseases. By this review, we demonstrate the capability and clinical potential of the imaging methods, with the hope of accelerating their adoption to clinical practice.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mingyan Wu
- Central Research Institute, UIH Group, Shanghai, China; School of Biomedical Engineering Building, Room 409, 393 Huaxia Middle Road, Shanghai 201210, China
| | - Jeff L Zhang
- School of Biomedical Engineering, ShanghaiTech University, Room 409, School of Biomedical Engineering Building, 393 Huaxia Middle Road, Shanghai 201210, China.
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Grattan-Smith JD, Chow J, Kurugol S, Jones RA. Quantitative renal magnetic resonance imaging: magnetic resonance urography. Pediatr Radiol 2022; 52:228-248. [PMID: 35022851 PMCID: PMC9670866 DOI: 10.1007/s00247-021-05264-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/26/2021] [Revised: 09/16/2021] [Accepted: 12/10/2021] [Indexed: 02/03/2023]
Abstract
The goal of functional renal imaging is to identify and quantitate irreversible renal damage and nephron loss, as well as potentially reversible hemodynamic changes. MR urography has evolved into a comprehensive evaluation of the urinary tract that combines anatomical imaging with functional evaluation in a single test without ionizing radiation. Quantitative functional MR imaging is based on dynamic contrast-enhanced MR acquisitions that provide progressive, visible enhancement of the renal parenchyma and urinary tract. The signal changes related to perfusion, concentration and excretion of the contrast agent can be evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative measures. Functional evaluation with MR has continued to improve as a result of significant technical advances allowing for faster image acquisition as well as the development of new tracer kinetic models of renal function. The most common indications for MR urography in children are the evaluation of congenital anomalies of the kidney and urinary tract including hydronephrosis and renal malformations, and the identification of ectopic ureters in children with incontinence. In this paper, we review the underlying acquisition schemes and techniques used to generate quantitative functional parameters including the differential renal function (DRF), asymmetry index, mean transit time (MTT), signal intensity versus time curves as well as the calculation of individual kidney glomerular filtration rate (GFR). Visual inspection and semi-quantitative assessment using the renal transit time (RTT) and calyceal transit times (CTT) are fundamental to accurate diagnosis and are used as a basis for the interpretation of the quantitative data. The importance of visual assessment of the images cannot be overstated when analyzing the quantitative measures of renal function.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Jeanne Chow
- Department of Radiology, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
| | - Sila Kurugol
- Department of Radiology, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
| | - Richard A Jones
- Department of Radiology, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
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Coll-Font J, Chen S, Eder R, Fang Y, Han QJ, van den Boomen M, Sosnovik DE, Mekkaoui C, Nguyen CT. Manifold-based respiratory phase estimation enables motion and distortion correction of free-breathing cardiac diffusion tensor MRI. Magn Reson Med 2022; 87:474-487. [PMID: 34390021 PMCID: PMC8616783 DOI: 10.1002/mrm.28972] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/19/2021] [Revised: 07/22/2021] [Accepted: 07/25/2021] [Indexed: 01/03/2023]
Abstract
PURPOSE For in vivo cardiac DTI, breathing motion and B0 field inhomogeneities produce misalignment and geometric distortion in diffusion-weighted (DW) images acquired with conventional single-shot EPI. We propose using a dimensionality reduction method to retrospectively estimate the respiratory phase of DW images and facilitate both distortion correction (DisCo) and motion compensation. METHODS Free-breathing electrocardiogram-triggered whole left-ventricular cardiac DTI using a second-order motion-compensated spin echo EPI sequence and alternating directionality of phase encoding blips was performed on 11 healthy volunteers. The respiratory phase of each DW image was estimated after projecting the DW images into a 2D space with Laplacian eigenmaps. DisCo and motion compensation were applied to the respiratory sorted DW images. The results were compared against conventional breath-held T2 half-Fourier single shot turbo spin echo. Cardiac DTI parameters including fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity, and helix angle transmurality were compared with and without DisCo. RESULTS The left-ventricular geometries after DisCo and motion compensation resulted in significantly improved alignment of DW images with T2 reference. DisCo reduced the distance between the left-ventricular contours by 13.2% ± 19.2%, P < .05 (2.0 ± 0.4 for DisCo and 2.4 ± 0.5 mm for uncorrected). DisCo DTI parameter maps yielded no significant differences (mean diffusivity: 1.55 ± 0.13 × 10-3 mm2 /s and 1.53 ± 0.13 × 10-3 mm2 /s, P = .09; fractional anisotropy: 0.375 ± 0.041 and 0.379 ± 0.045, P = .11; helix angle transmurality: 1.00% ± 0.10°/% and 0.99% ± 0.12°/%, P = .44), although the orientation of individual tensors differed. CONCLUSION Retrospective respiratory phase estimation with LE-based DisCo and motion compensation in free-breathing cardiac DTI resulting in significantly reduced geometric distortion and improved alignment within and across slices.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jaume Coll-Font
- Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA,Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA,Harvard Medical School, Boston (MA), USA
| | - Shi Chen
- Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA
| | - Robert Eder
- Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA
| | - Yiling Fang
- Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA,Institute of Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, (MA), USA
| | - Qiao Joyce Han
- Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA,Harvard Medical School, Boston (MA), USA
| | - Maaike van den Boomen
- Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA,Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA,Harvard Medical School, Boston (MA), USA,Department of Radiology, University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
| | - David E. Sosnovik
- Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA,Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA,Harvard Medical School, Boston (MA), USA
| | - Choukri Mekkaoui
- Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA,Harvard Medical School, Boston (MA), USA
| | - Christopher T. Nguyen
- Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA,Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (MA), USA,Harvard Medical School, Boston (MA), USA
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Koçanaoğullari A, Ariyurek C, Afacan O, Kurugol S. Learning the Regularization in DCE-MR Image Reconstruction for Functional Imaging of Kidneys. IEEE ACCESS : PRACTICAL INNOVATIONS, OPEN SOLUTIONS 2021; 10:4102-4111. [PMID: 35929000 PMCID: PMC9348606 DOI: 10.1109/access.2021.3139854] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/01/2023]
Abstract
Kidney DCE-MRI aims at both qualitative assessment of kidney anatomy and quantitative assessment of kidney function by estimating the tracer kinetic (TK) model parameters. Accurate estimation of TK model parameters requires an accurate measurement of the arterial input function (AIF) with high temporal resolution. Accelerated imaging is used to achieve high temporal resolution, which yields under-sampling artifacts in the reconstructed images. Compressed sensing (CS) methods offer a variety of reconstruction options. Most commonly, sparsity of temporal differences is encouraged for regularization to reduce artifacts. Increasing regularization in CS methods removes the ambient artifacts but also over-smooths the signal temporally which reduces the parameter estimation accuracy. In this work, we propose a single image trained deep neural network to reduce MRI under-sampling artifacts without reducing the accuracy of functional imaging markers. Instead of regularizing with a penalty term in optimization, we promote regularization by generating images from a lower dimensional representation. In this manuscript we motivate and explain the lower dimensional input design. We compare our approach to CS reconstructions with multiple regularization weights. Proposed approach results in kidney biomarkers that are highly correlated with the ground truth markers estimated using the CS reconstruction which was optimized for functional analysis. At the same time, the proposed approach reduces the artifacts in the reconstructed images.
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Affiliation(s)
- Aziz Koçanaoğullari
- Quantitative Intelligent Imaging Research Group (QUIN), Department of Radiology, Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
| | - Cemre Ariyurek
- Quantitative Intelligent Imaging Research Group (QUIN), Department of Radiology, Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
| | - Onur Afacan
- Quantitative Intelligent Imaging Research Group (QUIN), Department of Radiology, Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
| | - Sila Kurugol
- Quantitative Intelligent Imaging Research Group (QUIN), Department of Radiology, Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
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Flouri D, Lesnic D, Chrysochou C, Parikh J, Thelwall P, Sheerin N, Kalra PA, Buckley DL, Sourbron SP. Motion correction of free-breathing magnetic resonance renography using model-driven registration. MAGNETIC RESONANCE MATERIALS IN PHYSICS BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 2021; 34:805-822. [PMID: 34160718 PMCID: PMC8578117 DOI: 10.1007/s10334-021-00936-x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/11/2021] [Revised: 05/24/2021] [Accepted: 06/08/2021] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Abstract
INTRODUCTION Model-driven registration (MDR) is a general approach to remove patient motion in quantitative imaging. In this study, we investigate whether MDR can effectively correct the motion in free-breathing MR renography (MRR). MATERIALS AND METHODS MDR was generalised to linear tracer-kinetic models and implemented using 2D or 3D free-form deformations (FFD) with multi-resolution and gradient descent optimization. MDR was evaluated using a kidney-mimicking digital reference object (DRO) and free-breathing patient data acquired at high temporal resolution in multi-slice 2D (5 patients) and 3D acquisitions (8 patients). Registration accuracy was assessed using comparison to ground truth DRO, calculating the Hausdorff distance (HD) between ground truth masks with segmentations and visual evaluation of dynamic images, signal-time courses and parametric maps (all data). RESULTS DRO data showed that the bias and precision of parameter maps after MDR are indistinguishable from motion-free data. MDR led to reduction in HD (HDunregistered = 9.98 ± 9.76, HDregistered = 1.63 ± 0.49). Visual inspection showed that MDR effectively removed motion effects in the dynamic data, leading to a clear improvement in anatomical delineation on parametric maps and a reduction in motion-induced oscillations on signal-time courses. DISCUSSION MDR provides effective motion correction of MRR in synthetic and patient data. Future work is needed to compare the performance against other more established methods.
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Affiliation(s)
- Dimitra Flouri
- Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. .,Department of Biomedical Imaging Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. .,School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, Kings College London, London, UK. .,Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, London, UK.
| | - Daniel Lesnic
- Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
| | - Constantina Chrysochou
- Department of Renal Medicine, Salford Royal National Health Service Foundation Trust, Salford, UK
| | - Jehill Parikh
- Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.,Newcastle Magnetic Resonance Centre, Campus for Ageing and Vitality, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
| | - Peter Thelwall
- Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.,Newcastle Magnetic Resonance Centre, Campus for Ageing and Vitality, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
| | - Neil Sheerin
- Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
| | - Philip A Kalra
- Department of Renal Medicine, Salford Royal National Health Service Foundation Trust, Salford, UK
| | - David L Buckley
- Department of Biomedical Imaging Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
| | - Steven P Sourbron
- Department of Biomedical Imaging Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.,Department of Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
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