Fully-automatic determination of the arterial input function for dynamic contrast-enhanced pulmonary MR imaging

Recent studies have shown that dynamic contrast-enhanced pulmonary MR imaging (DCE-pMRI) is a very appropriate imaging technique for the clinical assessment of lung diseases. For the quantitative analysis of pulmonary blood flow (PBF), pulmonary blood volume (PBV), and mean transit time (MTT) an arterial input function (AIF) of the contrast agent entering the lung is required. The AIF is usually calculated from a user-drawn region-of-interest (ROI) within the feeding artery. Thus, the results of the quantitative analysis highly depend on the exact location and the size of the ROI and the reproducibility of the analysis is limited. This work presents a fully-automatic method to determine the AIF within the branching of the pulmonary trunk into left and right pulmonary artery.