Comparison of aortic lumen area and distensibility using cine and phase contrast acquisitions

The accuracy of the estimation of the aortic lumen area was investigated using an automated segmentation method (ART-FUN). The study included both Steady State Free Precession (SSFP) and Phase Contrast (PC) MR acquisition sequences. The precision of the segmented lumen area was tested against expert manual contouring for 860 aorta sections from three different MR scanners. Comparison of lumen areas and distensibility values obtained from both SSFP and PC sequences was also performed in a group of 50 subjects. While linear regressions indicated very similar manual and automated segmentations for SSFP and PC data (slope=1, r=0.99), the corresponding distensibility values were less correlated (slope=0.76, r=0.54).