Improving the discrimination of benign and malignant breast MRI lesions using the apparent diffusion coefficient

Paper i proceeding, 2010

This paper presents an investigation of the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) for improving the discrimination of benign and malignant lesions in breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In particular a method is presented for automatically selecting hyper intense tumour voxels in dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MRI data and evaluating their average ADC in the corresponding diffusion-weighted (DW) MRI data. The method was applied to ten breast MRI datasets obtained from routine clinical practice. The results demonstrate that the combination of the relative signal increase (DCE-MRI) with the apparent diffusion coefficient (DW-MRI) leads to better discrimination than with either feature alone. The results also suggest that it is important to acquire the DW-MRI data in a consistent fashion, i.e. either before or after the acquisition of the DCE-MRI data.