Pulmonary blood flow analysis based on two input model with aorta and pulmonary artery contribution using contrast-enhanced MRI

A new pulmonary blood flow analysis is proposed. It uses a two-input model to include the recirculation from the aorta into the lung. The impulse response from each input (pulmonary artery route and recirculated aorta route) is assumed to be a gamma variate model. The effect of each input is separately analyzed. Based on that, a method to determine the blood flow, blood volume and mean transit time is proposed. The method proposed is tested with MR contrast-enhanced images obtained from patients with lung cancer. It is shown that the recirculated blood flow can not be ignored for patients with lung cancer and without the lung arteries.