Quantitative renal function assessment of atheroembolic renal disease using view-shared compressed sensing based dynamic-contrast enhanced MR imaging: An in vivo study.

Atheroembolic renal disease (AERD) is the major cause of renal insufficiency in the elderly, and particularly, the diagnose of AERD is often delayed and even missed due to its nonspecific presentation and the sudden occurrence of an embolic event. To investigate the feasibility of the view-shared compressed sensing (VCS) based dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) in the assessment of AERD in animal models. The reproducibility of VCS DCE-MRI based glomerular filtration rate (GFR) estimation was first evaluated using the three healthy rabbits. Animal models of unilateral AERD were then conducted. All the rabbits underwent VCS DCE-MRI and the GFR maps were estimated by a commonly used cortical-compartment model. The whole kidney and suspicious lesion region GFR values of embolized kidneys were then compared with the corresponding values of normal kidneys. Finally, the suspicious lesion regions were confirmed by the corresponding renal specimens and histological findings. The reproducibility of GFR measurements was analyzed using the coefficient of variation and Bland-Altman analysis. The GFR values of normal and embolized kidneys were compared using the Student t-test. Contrast-enhanced images with sufficient diagnostic quality and reduced motion artifacts are obtained at a temporal resolution of 2.5 s. The Bland-Altman plot indicated close agreement between the GFR values estimated from between-day scans in healthy rabbits. Besides, there existed significant differences between the pixel-wise GFR values of normal and AERD kidneys in region-based comparison(P < 0.0001). The suspicious lesions are consistent well with the renal specimen and histological findings. The preliminary animal study verified the feasibility of VCS DCE-MRI for renal function evaluation, and the strategy could potentially provide a valuable tool to identify AERD.