Simultaneous measurement of T1 /B1 and pharmacokinetic model parameters using active contrast encoding (ACE)-MRI.

The aim of this study was to assess the feasibility of combining dynamic contrast enhanced-magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) with the measurement of the radiofrequency (RF) transmit field B1 and pre-contrast longitudinal relaxation time T10 . A novel approach has been proposed to simultaneously estimate B1 and T10 from a modified DCE-MRI scan that actively encodes the washout phase of the curve with different amounts of T1 and B1 weighting using multiple flip angles and repetition times, hence referred to as active contrast encoding (ACE)-MRI. ACE-MRI aims to simultaneously measure B1 and T10 , together with contrast kinetic parameters, such as the transfer constant Ktrans , interstitial space volume fraction ve and vascular space volume fraction vp . The proposed method was tested using numerical simulations and in vivo studies with mouse models of breast cancer implanted in the flank and mammary fat pad, and glioma in the brain. In the numerical simulation study with a signal-to-noise ratio of 10, both B1 and T10 were estimated accurately with errors of 5.1 ± 3.5% and 12.3 ± 8.8% and coefficients of variation (CV) of 14.9 ± 8.6% and 15.0 ± 5.0%, respectively. Using the same ACE-MRI data, the kinetic parameters Ktrans , ve and vp were also estimated with errors of 14.2 ± 8.3% (CV = 13.5 ± 4.6%), 14.7 ± 9.9% (CV = 13.3 ± 4.5%) and 14.0 ± 9.3% (CV = 14.0 ± 4.5%), respectively. For the in vivo tumor data from 11 mice, voxel-wise comparisons between ACE-MRI and DCE-MRI methods showed that the mean differences for the five parameters were as follows: ΔKtrans  = 0.006 (/min), Δve  = 0.016, Δvp  = 0.000, ΔB1  = -0.014 and ΔT1  = -0.085 (s), which suggests a good agreement between the two methods. When compared with separately measured B1 and T10 , and DCE-MRI estimated kinetic parameters as a reference, the mean relative errors of ACE-MRI estimation were B1  = -0.3%, T10  = -8.5%, Ktrans  = 11.4%, ve  = 14.5% and vp  = 4.5%. This proof-of-concept study demonstrates that the proposed ACE-MRI method can be used to estimate B1 and T10 , together with contrast kinetic model parameters.