Feasibility study of 4-dimensional free-breathing dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI for liver quantitative perfusion at 3T on oncology patients

Motivation: The requirements for multiple breath-holds would cause motion artifacts, which may impair the accurate evaluation of lesion properties in dynamic perfusion scans. Goal(s): To evaluate the clinical feasibility of free-breathing dynamic liver MR perfusion(FBP) compared with breath-holding dynamic perfusion(BHP) method. Approach: A case-control study of 58 oncology patients were collected. The image quality, intervolume motion effect and diagnostic confidence were compared between the two groups. Results: Four-dimensional free-breathing dynamic liver MR perfusion (4D-FBP) could provide comparable image quality but significantly fewer motions than routine method, making 4D-FBP an attractive alternative to existing breath-holding techniques in clinical dynamic liver MR scans. Impact: Free-breathing dynamic liver MR perfusion provides significantly improved intervolume motion and comparable image quality in comparison to the routine breath-holding method, which may promote the clinical translation of liver quantitative perfusion.