Motion Compensated Generalized Reconstruction for Free-Breathing Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced MRI

The analysis of abdominal and thoracic dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI is often impaired by artifacts and misregistration caused by physiological motion. Breath-hold is too short to cover long acquisitions. A novel multipurpose reconstruction technique, entitled dynamic contrast-enhanced generalized reconstruction by inversion of coupled systems, is presented. It performs respiratory motion compensation in terms of both motion artefact correction and registration. It comprises motion modeling and contrast-change modeling. The method feeds on physiological signals and x-f space properties of dynamic series to invert a coupled system of linear equations. The unknowns solved for represent the parameters for a linear nonrigid motion model and the parameters for a linear contrast-change model based on B-splines. Performance is demonstrated on myocardial perfusion imaging, on six simulated data sets and six clinical exams. The main purpose consists in removing motion-induced errors from time-intensity curves, thus improving curve analysis and postprocessing in general. This method alleviates postprocessing difficulties in dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI and opens new possibilities for dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI analysis. Magn Reson Med 65:812-822, 2011. (c) 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.