Quantification of DCE-MRI: A validation of three techniques with 3D-histology

Three different DCE-MRI quantification methods: model-free-based, compartment-model-based and principal component analysis, are compared by evaluating parameter maps for histological defined volumes of vital and non-vital tumor tissue. To obtain an accurate spatial correspondence between histology and DCE-MRI, a two-step registration process was used involving dense histological sampling, a reference plane and an intermediate ex vivo MRI. Results show that the model-free parameter washout and the second principal component score can adequately separate vital from non-vital tumor tissue, with an accuracy of respectively 99.2% and 99.7%. The other model-free parameters and the compartment-model-based Ktrans show some overlap in values between vital and non-vital tissue. The first, third and fourth pc-score have limited discriminative power.