Feasibility of Gadolinium Contrast Reduced Brain MRI: the Potential of Deep Learning

MRI scans were performed using 3 different 1.5T scanners with an eight-channel head coils. Following a 3D pre-contrast T1w scan, a low-dose contrast-enhanced 3D T1w scan was obtained using 20% (0.02 mmol/kg) of the standard dosage of gadoterate meglumine.

The subjects were immediately administered the remaining 80% (0.08 mmol/kg) of the contrast agent to reach the standard dose of 0.1 mmol/kg, which served as a training ground truth for further quantitative assessment. All three acquisitions were performed during a single imaging session, with no additional gadolinium dose administered above the standard protocol.

Study Overview

• Status: Withdrawn
• Conditions: Artificial Intelligence; Deep Learning
• Intervention / Treatment: Device: DeepGad

• Study Type: Interventional
• Phase: Phase 1

Contacts and Locations

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: Adult; Older Adult
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

1. Clinical indications for imaging with a contrast-enhanced 3D-T1w MRI sequence including tumor suspicion, postoperative tumor follow-up, multiple sclerosis, routine brain imaging, etc.,
2. no plan for dynamic contrast administration or deviation from the standard dose of 0.1 mmol/kg body weight (e.g., sella imaging, magnetic resonance angiography),
3. no clinical contraindications to imaging prolongation (i.e., emergency, poor patient condition).

Exclusion Criteria:

1. prominent image artifacts,
2. incomplete study sequences (e.g., early termination)
3. errors related to contrast agent administration.

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

Design Details

• Primary Purpose: Diagnostic
• Allocation: N/A
• Interventional Model: Single Group Assignment
• Masking: None (Open Label)

Number of Arms

1

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm

Intervention / Treatment

Experimental: DeepGad; The dataset comprises a total of 500 patients, with 300 patients used for model training and 200 patients reserved for model testing. Each patient had approximately 350 2D brain slices of the coregistered 3D volumes excluding the five slices at the base and five slices at the top of the acquired volume due to their low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). For robustness and to avoid overfitting, standard DL data augmentation techniques consisting of eight types of transformations were applied to each case in the training set.

Device: DeepGad; Using the pre-contrast and low-dose Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance (CE-MRI) images as input and the true full-dose CE-MRI images as the ground truth. the Cycle GAN deep network (DeepGad), was trained to reconstruct the full-dose CE-MRI images from low-dose CE-MRI images.

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Image quality	Image quality using a 5-point Likert scale covering 1 (none), 2 (poor), 3 (moderate), 4 (good), and 5(excellent) ratings	1 Day After MRI session
Vessel conspicuity	(0) no normal vessels observed, (1) significant decrease in conspicuity with potential impact on diagnosis, (2) mild decrease in conspicuity with unlikely impact on diagnosis, (3) normal conspicuity, (4) mild increase in conspicuity with unlikely impact on diagnosis, and (5) significant increase in conspicuity with potential impact on diagnosis.	1 Day After MRI session

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Enhancement pattern	(a) no enhancement, (b) homogeneous enhancement, (c) heterogeneous enhancement, (d) ring enhancement, (e) linear enhancement, and (f) other enhancement.	1 Day After MRI session

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: DeepMeds

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start (Estimated): August 30, 2024
• Primary Completion (Estimated): September 1, 2024
• Study Completion (Estimated): September 15, 2024

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: May 30, 2024
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: June 11, 2024
• First Posted (Actual): June 17, 2024

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Actual): March 25, 2025
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: February 3, 2025
• Last Verified: February 1, 2025

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Other Study ID Numbers: DG53024

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

• Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?: NO

Drug and device information, study documents

• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product: No
• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product: No
• product manufactured in and exported from the U.S.: No