Measuring subtle Blood‐Brain Barrier permeability changes with reduced scan time in DCE‐MRI

Increasing evidence suggests the subtle changes of Blood‐Brain Barrier (BBB) permeability in normal aging and in Alzheimer’s disease using Dynamic Contrast‐Enhanced MRI (DCE‐MRI). However, measuring this subtle change poses great challenge for accurate measurement, resulting in inconsistent results among previous studies. Two major challenges are long scan times, as suggested by previous studies and selection of the arterial input function (AIF). In this study, we aim to estimate the capillary level input function (CIF) using a deep learning network to overcome these two challenges.