MRI‐based quantification of whole‐organ renal metabolic rate of oxygen

Abstract

AbstractDuring the early stages of diabetes, kidney oxygen utilization increases. The mismatch between oxygen demand and supply contributes to tissue hypoxia, a key driver of chronic kidney disease. Thus, whole‐organ renal metabolic rate of oxygen (rMRO2) is a potentially valuable biomarker of kidney function. The key parameters required to determine rMRO2 include the renal blood flow rate (RBF) in the feeding artery and oxygen saturation in the draining renal vein (SvO2). However, there is currently no noninvasive method to quantify rMRO2 in absolute physiologic units. Here, a new MRI pulse sequence, Kidney Metabolism of Oxygen via T2 and Interleaved Velocity Encoding (K‐MOTIVE), is described, along with evaluation of its performance in the human kidney in vivo. K‐MOTIVE interleaves a phase‐contrast module before a background‐suppressed T2‐prepared balanced steady‐state‐free‐precession (bSSFP) readout to measure RBF and SvO2 in a single breath‐hold period of 22 s, yielding rMRO2 via Fick's principle. Variants of K‐MOTIVE to evaluate alternative bSSFP readout strategies were studied. Kidney mass was manually determined from multislice gradient recalled echo images. Healthy subjects were recruited to quantify rMRO2 of the left kidney at 3‐T field strength (N = 15). Assessments of repeat reproducibility and comparisons with individual measurements of RBF and SvO2 were performed, and the method's sensitivity was evaluated with a high‐protein meal challenge (N = 8). K‐MOTIVE yielded the following metabolic parameters: T2 = 157 ± 19 ms; SvO2 = 92% ± 6%; RBF = 400 ± 110 mL/min; and rMRO2 = 114 ± 117(μmol O2/min)/100 g tissue. Reproducibility studies of T2 and RBF (parameters directly measured by K‐MOTIVE) resulted in coefficients of variation less than 10% and intraclass correlation coefficients more than 0.75. The high‐protein meal elicited an increase in rMRO2, which was corroborated by serum biomarkers. The K‐MOTIVE sequence measures SvO2 and RBF, the parameters necessary to quantify whole‐organ rMRO2, in a single breath‐hold. The present work demonstrates that rMRO2 quantification is feasible with good reproducibility. rMRO2 is a potentially valuable physiological biomarker.