Q-Space Imaging of Abdominal Tumor

¹Chair in Computer Assisted Clinical Medicine, University of Heidelberg, Faculty of Medicine, Mannheim, Germany; ²Department of Medical Physics in Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany

In this study, we demonstrate the first implementation of q-space imaging of the abdomen and evaluate its potential to improve the delineation of malignancies in comparison to conventional ADC-maps. We show that the implemented q-space sequence provides good image quality notwithstanding the abdominal motion. We also show that there is a substantial difference in signal decay between healthy pancreatic tissue and pancreatic tumor. In the resulting q-space derived maps, especially in the P(0) map, tumor delineation is clearly superior to conventional ADC maps