Convolutional Neural Networks for Direct Inference of Pharmacokinetic Parameters: Application to Stroke Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced MRI

Background and Purpose: The T1-weighted dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE)-MRI is an imaging technique that provides a quantitative measure of pharmacokinetic (PK) parameters reflecting microvascular characteristics of tissues. For the present study, we propose a new machine learning (ML) based approach to directly estimate the PK parameters from the acquired DCE-MRI image-time series that is both more robust and faster than conventional model...