Spatial-temporal Dynamics of Pulmonary Blood Flow in Interstitial Lung Disease

摘要: Rationale Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a common complication of interstitial lung disease (ILD) and is associated with worse clinical outcomes. Histopathological changes in pulmonary microvasculature are known to occur long before development of clinically significant PH. There is an urgent need to develop new biomarkers that can identify vascular disease before it is clinically evident and discriminate it from parenchymal aberrations to guide targeted therapy. Global fluctuation dispersion (FDglobal), a spatial-temporal metric derived from serial images of the pulmonary perfusion obtained with MRI-arterial spin labelling (ASL), describes temporal fluctuations in the spatial distribution of perfusion. Our lab has previously reported significantly higher FDglobal in healthy subjects exposed to hyperoxia, hypoxia, inhaled nitric oxide as well as in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) consistent with …