A model selection framework to quantify microvascular liver function in gadoxetate-enhanced MRI: Application to healthy liver, diseased tissue, and hepatocellular carcinoma.

In patient data, gadoxetate exhibits different kinetics: (a) between liver and tumor regions and (b) within regions due to liver disease and/or tumor heterogeneity. Our generalized framework selects a physiological interpretation at each voxel, without preselecting a model for each region or duplicating time-consuming optimizations for models with identical functional forms.