ROI or Voxel DCE Analysis in Clinical Applications

I. Overview Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) is a rapidly evolving imaging technique, and it is widely applicable in management of various cancers. It is the current standard for breast MR imaging; also many research studies have been conducted to evaluate its application for other cancers. This tutorial is focused on the analysis of DCE-MRI data, and how the analyzed parameters are used in clinical diagnosis and therapy monitoring. Since DCE-MRI is the most established for breast imaging, I will use breast cancer as examples. The ROI-based and pixel-by-pixel based analyses are the two main methods. For diagnosis, the hot spot ROI approach to characterize tissues with the most aggressive pathology is commonly used; but for therapy response monitoring, the whole tumor should be analyzed. The commercial software that is available for quantitative analysis of DCE-MRI will be described.