Intra-voxel incoherent motion magnetic resonance imaging of the living human fetus: the technique and within-subject reproducibility

Abstract

Our purpose was to test the within-subject repeatability of the perfusion fraction, diffusion coefficient and pseudo diffusion coefficient measurements in various fetal organs and in the placenta based on the intra-voxel incoherent motion imaging principle. In utero diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging was performed on 1.5T and 3.0T clinical scanners with b-factors ranging from 0 to 900 s/mm2 in 16 steps and a tetrahedral diffusion-weighting encoding scheme. Data from 16 pregnant women (maternal age: 34 {+/-} 4.9 years, range: 24.6 -40.8) were included in this pilot study. For 15 cases, IVIM was repeated (maternal age: 33.7 {+/-} 5.2 years, range: 24.6 - 40.8). A bi-exponential model was fitted on the volume-averaged diffusion values and the perfusion fraction (f), diffusion coefficient (d) and pseudo diffusion coefficient (D*) were calculated. Within-subject repeatability was given as the test-retest variability of the IVIM parameters in the fetal frontal cortex, frontal white matter, cerebellum, lungs, kidneys, liver and in the placenta. An in-house developed image processing script was utilized to remove the image frames with excessive motion, and to perform motion correction by using non-linear freeform deformations. For the fetal lungs, liver and the placenta, within-subject variability ranged from 14.4% to 20.4% for f, 12.2% to 14.1% for d and 16.8% to 25.3% for D*. The diffusion coefficients of the investigated brain regions were moderately to highly reproducible (4.8% to 15.2%), however, f and D* showed inferior reproducibility compared to corresponding measures derived for the lungs, liver and placenta. The IVIM-based parameters of the fetal kidney were revealed to be highly variable across scans. Our results indicate that in utero intra-voxel incoherent motion magnetic resonance imaging potentially provides a novel method for examining microvascular perfusion and diffusion in the developing human fetus. The reproducible quantification of the perfusion and diffusion parameters depend greatly upon data quality, fetal and maternal movements, and image post processing to detect and remove corrupted data before calculating the IVIM model.