MR Image Quality and Liver Lesion Detection With Gadopiclenol: Comparison With Gadoxetate Disodium

Gadopiclenol is a new macrocyclic gadolinium-based contrast agent (GBCA) which has higher relaxivity than other GBCAs with a potential use of lower dose and comparable pharmacokinetics to other agents in preclinical studies. In a rodent model of liver metastasis, gadopiclenol showed strong enhancement with comparable pharmacokinetics to other extracellular GBCAs (EC-GBCAs). It was found to have a potential of either improving lesion conspicuity or providing similar accuracy in lesion detection with a reduced Gadolinium (Gd) dose. In a rat brain tumor model, half dose (0.05 mmol/kg) of gadopiclenol yielded comparable contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and morphological characterization of brain tumors compared to other EC-GBCAs. There are also a few clinical studies in which no safety concern was raised with the use of gadopiclenol. No dose adjustment for children or patients with renal impairment was found to be required. There is no study in the literature assessing the enhancement properties of gadopiclenol in abdominal imaging and comparing it with a hepatobiliary agent for image quality and lesion detection/conspicuity in the liver. For this study, it is hypothesized that dynamic imaging using Gadopiclenol is noninferior to gadoxetate MRI in terms of image quality and lesion detection/conspicuity.