Program Information
The Effectiveness of Deformable and Rigid-Body Registration On Estimating Pharmacokinetic Parameters of DCE-MRI of Esophageal Cancer Patients
J Lee*, J Ma , B Carter , L Court , S Lin , UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX
Presentations
TU-AB-601-11 (Tuesday, August 1, 2017) 7:30 AM - 9:30 AM Room: 601
Purpose: To investigate the effectiveness of deformable and rigid-body image registration with different reference images on estimating pharmacokinetic parameters of dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) of esophageal cancer patients.
Methods: We investigated ten patients with esophageal cancer on DCE-MRI images. The images were acquired on a 3.0T whole body scanner with an eight-channel torso-phased array coil. Each patient’s scan consisted of 16 slices with 100 temporal phases. Rigid-body and deformable registrations were performed on DCE-MRI images at three different time points (pre-contrast, maximum uptake, and washout) as reference images. The deformable registration used non-rigid B-spline transforms in a multi-resolution scheme while Euler transforms were used for rigid-body registration. Stochastic gradient descent optimizer and mutual information (MI) as a similarity measure were used for the quality of alignment. Four pharmacokinetic parameters Kᵗʳᵃⁿˢ, vₑ, kep, and initial area under the gadolinium curve (IAUGC) were estimated using GenIQ (GE Healthcare, Waukesha, WI) for comparison. A nonparametric statistical test (Kruskal-Wallis test) and the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) assessed the consistency and reproducibility of the pharmacokinetic parameters estimated with both registration methods at different time points on DCE-MRI images.
Results: Kruskal-Wallis test demonstrated significant differences (p-value < 0.05) in all of the estimated parameters for deformable registration but no significant differences (p-values > 0.78) for rigid-body registration. The ICC for rigid-body registration was higher than that for deformable registration for each pharmacokinetic parameter. This indicates that, for rigid-body registration, the parameter values from different reference images of one patient tended to be similar to each other. In contrast, the values for deformable registration were more variable.
Conclusion: The choice of the reference image of deformable registration significantly affected the estimates of pharmacokinetic parameters and rigid-body registration is recommended for the estimates of pharmacokinetic parameters in DCE-MRI of esophageal cancer.
Funding Support, Disclosures, and Conflict of Interest: Funding supports (The Scurlock Foundation to the Cancer for Radiation Oncology Research at the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center; National Cancer Institute Cancer Center Support Grant, CA016672; Elekta Inc)
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