Evaluation of adaptive perfusion models in dynamic contrast-enhanced ultrasound (DCE-US)

Two new perfusions models of ultrasound contrast agents were derived from physiological considerations, and were compared to three published models to verify their reliability. All models were tested on a total of 43 clinical and preclinical data. The quality of the curve-fitting was estimated both by measuring the residuals and the correlation between the original data and the model. The result show that while most of the models fitted reliably the experimental data for long bolus injection, their fitting quality degrades significantly on replenishment data where less information was available. One of the newly proposed models was proved to keep a good quality of fitting in this situation which makes it a very good generic model.