Lung morphometry using hyperpolarized Xe multi-b diffusion MRI with compressed sensing in healthy subjects and patients with COPD.

Purpose: To demonstrate the feasibility of compressed sensing (CS) to accelerate the acquisition of hyperpolarized (HP) Xe multi-b diffusion MRI for quantitative assessments of lung microstructural morphometry.

Methods: Six healthy subjects and six chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) subjects underwent HP Xe multi-b diffusion MRI (b = 0, 10, 20, 30, and 40 s/cm ). First, a fully sampled (FS) acquisition of HP Xe multi-b diffusion MRI was conducted in one healthy subject. The acquired FS dataset was retrospectively undersampled in the phase encoding direction, and an optimal twofold undersampled pattern was then obtained by minimizing mean absolute error (MAE) between retrospective CS (rCS) and FS MR images. Next, the FS and CS acquisitions during separate breath holds were performed on five healthy subjects (including the above one). Additionally, the FS and CS synchronous acquisitions during a single breath hold were performed on the sixth healthy subject and one COPD subject. However, only CS acquisitions were conducted in the rest of the five COPD subjects. Finally, all the acquired FS, rCS and CS MR images were used to obtain morphometric parameters, including acinar duct radius (R), acinar lumen radius (r), alveolar sleeve depth (h), mean linear intercept (L ), and surface-to-volume ratio (SVR). The Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the Bland-Altman plot were employed to assess the fidelity of the CS reconstruction. Moreover, the t-test was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the multi-b diffusion MRI with CS in clinical applications.

Results: The retrospective results demonstrated that there was no statistically significant difference between rCS and FS measurements using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (P > 0.05). Good agreement between measurements obtained with the CS and FS acquisitions during separate breath holds was demonstrated in Bland-Altman plots of slice differences. Specifically, the mean biases of the R, r, h, L , and SVR between the CS and FS acquisitions were 1.0%, 2.6%, -0.03%, 1.5%, and -5.5%, respectively. Good agreement between measurements with the CS and FS acquisitions was also observed during the single breath-hold experiments. Furthermore, there were significant differences between the morphometric parameters for the healthy and COPD subjects (P < 0.05).

Conclusions: Our study has shown that HP Xe multi-b diffusion MRI with CS could be beneficial in lung microstructural assessments by acquiring less data while maintaining the consistent results with the FS acquisitions.