Four-Dimensional Magnetic Resonance Imaging With 3-Dimensional Radial Sampling and Self-Gating–Based K-Space Sorting: Early Clinical Experience on Pancreatic Cancer Patients

Abstract

Purpose Dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used to characterize internal organ motion but real time acquisition is typically limited to 2 dimensions. Methods have been developed to reconstruct four dimensional MRI (4D-MRI) based on time-stamped 2D images or 2D K-space data. These methods suffer from anisotropic resolution and rebinning artifacts. We applied a novel self-gating K-space sorted 4D-MRI (SG-KS-4D-MRI) method to overcome these limitations and to monitor pancreatic tumor motion. Methods and Material Ten patients were imaged using 4D-CT, cine 2D-MRI and the SG-KS-4D-MRI, which is a spoiled gradient recalled echo (GRE) sequence with 3D radial-sampling K-space projections and 1D projection-based self-gating. Tumor volumes were defined on all phases in both 4D-MRI and 4D-CT and then compared. Results An isotropic resolution of 1.56 mm was achieved in the SG-KS-4D-MRI images, which showed superior soft tissue contrast to 4D-CT and appeared to be free of visible rebinning artifacts. The tumor motion trajectory cross-correlations between SG-KS-4D-MRI and cine 2D-MRI in SI, AP and ML directions were 0.93±0.03, 0.83±0.10 and 0.74±0.18, respectively. The tumor motion trajectories cross-correlations between SG-KS-4D-MRI and 4D-CT in SI, AP and ML directions were 0.91±0.06, 0.72±0.16 and 0.44±0.24, respectively. The average standard deviation of GTV volume (GTV_σ) calculated from the ten breathing phases were 0.81 cc and 1.02 cc for SG-KS-4D-MRI and 4D-CT (p=0.012). Conclusions A novel SG-KS-4D-MRI acquisition method capable of reconstructing rebinning artifact free high resolution 4D-MRI images was used to quantify pancreas tumor motion. The resultant pancreatic tumor motion trajectories agreed well with 2D-cine-MRI and 4D-CT. The pancreatic tumor volumes shown in the different phases for the SG-KS-4D-MRI were statistically significantly more consistent than those in the 4D-CT.

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