Madym: A C++ toolkit for quantitative DCE-MRI analysis

Abstract

In dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) a sequence of MRI images are acquired to measure the passage of a contrast-agent within a tissue of interest. Quantitative DCE-MRI (DCE-MRI), in which one or more tracer-kinetic models are fitted to the contrast-agent concentration time-series, enables the estimation of clinically useful parameters of tissue microvasculature (Tofts et al., 1999). Madym is a C++ toolkit for quantitative DCE-MRI analysis developed at the University of Manchester. It comprises a set of command line tools and a graphical user-interface based on an extendable C++ library. It is cross-platform, and requires few external libraries to build from source. Pre-built binaries (with all dependencies included) for Windows, MacOS and Linux are available so that Madym can be installed directly for users not wanting to or unable to compile the C++ source themselves. We have also developed complementary interfaces in Matlab (available in a separate open-source repository (M. Berks, 2021b)) and python (integrated with the main toolkit), that allow the flexibility of developing in those scripting languages, while allowing C++ to do the heavy-duty computational work of tracer-kinetic model fitting.