Cemre Ariyurek, Onur Afacan, Jeanne Chow, Simon Warfield, and Sila Kurugol
Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

Estimating glomerular filtration rate (GFR) is crucial for diagnostic purposes. DCE-MRI is
capable of measuring tracer kinetic parameters of kidney function. Tracer kinetic models
require arterial input function to find tracer kinetic parameters such as filtration rate. However,
determining the arterial input function concentration is challenging and important for
estimating GFR accurately. Here, we propose to use reference region model to improve arterial
input function selection to estimate GFR more accurately. Comparing the GFR values
estimated using the improved arterial input function with the ground truth GFR, we have
observed a significant decrease in the mean absolute error in GFR.