Highly accelerated dynamic contrast enhanced imaging with prospective undersampling

Introduction: Dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) imaging employs serial T1-weighted scans to quantify the pharmacokinetics of an injectable contrast agent. This allows assessment of tissue properties such as vascular permeability. Clinical applications of DCE, such as tumor characterization, will benefit from improvements in spatiotemporal resolution and volume coverage beyond what is possible today. Recently, numerous works have demonstrated accelerated DCE with constrained reconstructions of retrospectively undersampled data [1-3]. These works utilized a single data constraint and reported acceleration factors up to 6x. Prospectively accelerated acquisitions have yet to be demonstrated or validated but have the potential for full brain coverage and patient specific arterial input function detection. Here, we present accelerated DCE imaging using both prospective and retrospective data undersampling and a constrained reconstruction employing parallel imaging and compressed sensing. We demonstrate high-resolution in-vivo DCE images acquired with an 8.5x acceleration rate in 2D mode. Retrospective reconstructions suggest even higher acceleration will be possible in 3D mode.