Estimation of Pharmacokinetic Parameters in Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI Via Random Forest Regression

We propose a novel alternative approach to estimate pharmacokinetic (PK) parameters of dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE)-MRI. Our approach leverages machine learning field and mainly targets to automatically learn temporal patterns of the voxel-wise concentration-time curves (CTCs) from a large amount of training samples in order to make accurate parameter estimations. We consider the estimation of parameters as a regression problem and specifically use Random Forest (RF) regression. We demonstrate its potential and utility to improve the conventional model-fitting based quantitative analysis of DCE-MRI especially in various noise conditions, and validate our method on clinical brain stroke datasets.     «

We propose a novel alternative approach to estimate pharmacokinetic (PK) parameters of dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE)-MRI. Our approach leverages machine learning field and mainly targets to automatically learn temporal patterns of the voxel-wise concentration-time curves (CTCs) from a large amount of training samples in order to make accurate parameter estimations. We consider the estimation of parameters as a regression problem and specifically use Random Forest (RF) regression. We demonstrat...     »