Multislice brain mapping and quantification of perfusion MRI data

With the recent development, magnetic resonance imaging went beyond the anatomical and morphological imaging and gave information about physiological properties of the tissues [1]. Anatomical images with high resolution could be get by MRI using a combination of rapid imaging techniques and bolus injection of extracellular contrast agents. Perfusion weighted MRI (PWI) has been used in clinical practices since 1989 [2,3]. The contrast agents cause a signal change and the change over time can be analyzed to evaluate important cerebral hemodynamics like, cerebral blood volume (CBV), cerebral blood flow (CBF) and mean transit time (MTT) [4]. In this study, MATLAB software has been used for writing codes for both mathematical equations and graphical user interface. As well as perfusion maps, we aimed to develop an easy-to-use interface so that technicians could run the program on site in a few minutes. User can achieve all operations easily, see information about patient and study, review all MR images in cine-mode, learn the absolute values of the regions, change colormaps of the results and save results in different image formats. All results of 11 patients with different clinical presentations were compared with another commercial software and for these patients three different statistics tables of comparison were given.