Background:
Ovarian cancer is the fifth commonest cancer affecting women in the developed world and is the primary indication for gynecological surgery. Quantitative dynamic contrast enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) has been shown beneficial to differentiate malignant and benign tumors and is increasingly used as the investigational biomarker of response in clinical studies based on the measurement of enhancement characteristics. One of the major assumptions in quantification of DCE-MRI in abdominal organs is spatially-fixed region of interest over the time course of contrast agent passage. However, there are two types of motion occurring in the image series, which could invalidate this assumption and thus the quantification outcome: one of them from complex motion resulting from breathing, pulsation and the natural movement of the organ of interest, and the other one from the motion of the contrast agent. Thus, the accurate quantification of DCE-MR image series highly depends on minimization of motion artifacts.