Evaluation of renal function using first pass contrast enhanced MRI

Abstract

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of the kidney has a great potential because the functional parameters, which can be investigated obtained noninvasively are multiple: glomerular filtration, tubular concentration and transit, blood volume andperfusion, diffusion and oxygenation. These require either endogeneous contrast agents, such as water protons (for perfusion and diffusion) or deoxyhemogobin (for oxgenation),or exogeneous contrast agents, such as gadolinium chelates (for filtration and perfusion)or iron oxide particles (for perfusion). In this thesis work, an integrated renal perfu-sion analysis method is presented, which allows multi-slice animation of renal perfusionimages, automatic image registration, quantification of time-intensity curves from desired region of interests (ROI's), and estimation of indexes such as slope, time-to-peak,and contrast enhancement ratio (CER). It was designed as a MATLAB package forreading, displaying, saving and analyzing renal perfusion Magnetic Resonance (MR)images which are in DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) format. Performance of this package was tested on data obtained from MRI scans onten volunteers with normal kidney function and both efficient qualitative assessmentof differential enhancement of the two kidneys and more accurate time-intensity curveevaluation free from respiratory motion were obtained.|Keywords: MRI, contrast enhanced MRI, renal function, renal perfusion analy- sis, signal intensity-time curves.