Moti Freiman1,
Jeannette M. Perez-Rossello1, Michael J. Callahan1,
Mark E. Bittman1, Robert V. Mulkern1, Athos Bousvaros2,
Simon K. Warfield1
1Radiology,
Harvard Medical School/Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States;
2Gastroenterology, Harvard Medical School/Boston Children's
Hospital, Boston, MA, United States
Inflammation processes in the ileum are associated with narrowing extra-cellular space due to lamina propria and submucosa of the small bowel and lymphoid aggregates, and vascular dilation and changes in blood supply. Both phenomena may alter the quantitative measurements derived from Diffusion-Weighted MRI with fast and slow diffusion analysis. Our investigation show that the newly presented spatially constrained IM model analysis reveals significant difference in both the slow-diffusion parameter (D), associated with narrowing extra-cellular space, and in the fractional contribution of the fast-diffusion parameter (f) associated with changes in microcirculation. However, the independent voxel-wise Intra-Voxel Incoherent Motion (IVIM) analysis reveals significant difference only in the fractional contribution of the fast-diffusion parameter (f). The spatially constrained IM model provides more precise insight to the physiological causes of the DW-MRI signal decay in Crohn's ileitis patients. We are planning to evaluate the clinical advantage achieved by using this new model in analyzing inflammatory activity in Crohn's disease patients.