Atherosclerotic plaque inflammation quantification using dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI.

Inflammation plays an important role in atherosclerosis. Given the increasing interest in using in-vivo imaging methods to study the physiology and treatment effects in atherosclerosis, noninvasive intraplaque inflammation quantitative method is needed. Dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been proposed and validated to quantitatively characterize atherosclerotic plaque inflammation. Recent studies have optimized the imaging protocol, pharmacokinetic modeling techniques. All of these technical advances further promoted DCE-MRI to clinical investigations in plaque risk assessment and therapeutic response monitor. Although larger clinical studies are still needed, DCE-MRI has been proven to be a promising tool to reveal more about intraplaque inflammation by in vivo quantitative inflammation imaging.