title: DCE@urLAB: a dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI pharmacokinetic analysis tool for preclinical data.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  DCE@urLAB is a software application for analysis of dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging data (DCE-MRI). The tool incorporates a friendly graphical user interface (GUI) to interactively select and analyze a region of interest (ROI) within the image set, taking into account the tissue concentration of the contrast agent (CA) and its effect on pixel intensity.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Pixel-wise model-based quantitative parameters are estimated by fitting DCE-MRI data to several pharmacokinetic models using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm (LMA). DCE@urLAB also includes the semi-quantitative parametric and heuristic analysis approaches commonly used in practice. This software application has been programmed in the Interactive Data Language (IDL) and tested both with publicly available simulated data and preclinical studies from tumor-bearing mouse brains.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  A user-friendly solution for applying pharmacokinetic and non-quantitative analysis DCE-MRI in preclinical studies has been implemented and tested. The proposed tool has been specially designed for easy selection of multi-pixel ROIs. A public release of DCE@urLAB, together with the open source code and sample datasets, is available at http://www.die.upm.es/im/archives/DCEurLAB/.
authors.affiliation: CIBER de Bioingeniería, Biomateriales y Nanomedicina (CIBER-BBN), 50018 Zaragoza, Spain. juanen@die.upm.es.
authors.forename: Juan E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Ortuño
authors.forename: María J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Ledesma-Carbayo
authors.forename: Rui V
authors.initials: RV
authors.lastname: Simões
authors.forename: Ana P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Candiota
authors.forename: Carles
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Arús
authors.forename: Andrés
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Santos
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D001932:Brain Neoplasms / Q000378:metabolism / Q000473:pathology; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003287:Contrast Media / Q000493:pharmacokinetics*; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D016018:Least-Squares Analysis; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D051379:Mice; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D003287:Contrast Media