T1 versus T2 weighted magnetic resonance imaging to quantify kidney volume in healthy volunteers

Abstract

Abstract: -

Background and Aim: - Kidney volume (KV) measurement is widely used to estimate the kidney function and MRI is one of the popular modalities used for KV quantification. Two commonly used MRI sequences are T1 and T2-weighted sequences. This study aims to compare T1-weighted versus T2-weighted MRI for performing reproducible and reliable KV measurements on 6 healthy volunteers. Materials & Methods: - In our study, 6 healthy volunteers were scanned on 3.0T Siemens scanner using T1w-DIXON and T2w-HASTE breath-hold MRI sequences. Manual segmentation was used to delineate the kidneys twice by the same operator for computing the KV. Mean error (ME), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and coefficient of variation (CV) were computed to compare the differences between KV measurements from both MRI sequences. Furthermore, Bland-Altman analysis was used to compare the agreement between KV measurements. Results and Conclusion: - The mean KV for T1 was found to be close to the reference KV from literature (202  36 (male); 154  33 (female)). Also, T1w had lower MAE and ME compared to T2w-HASTE sequence. The computed limits of agreement (LOA) for T1 were -4.1% and 2.19% while LOA for T2 were -17.6% and 8.6%. Additionally, CV was lower for T1w than for the T2w MRI. Our study found that T1w MRI sequence was more accurate, reproducible, precise, and reliable in computing KV measurements in comparison with T2w sequence. The time recorded for segmentation was higher for T1w than T2w MRI.