Jutta Janke1,
Andreas Wetscherek1, Bram Stieltjes2, Frederik B. Laun1,
2
1Dpt.
Medical Physics in Radiology, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg,
Baden-Wrttemberg, Germany; 2Quantitative Imaging-Based Disease
Characterization, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg,
Baden-Wrttemberg, Germany
The Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC) of lipids may be a valuable biomarker for various diseases, e.g. diabetes. The low ADC of lipids requires the use of long diffusion weightings, which results in low signal-to-noise ratios. Compensating the low SNR by thicker slices lead to unexpected artifacts, which usually do not appear in water diffusion experiments. In particular, we observed pronounced signal drops that we attribute to tissue pulsation and imperfect slice selections due to residual eddy currents. We compensated for these signal drops by using only the maximal signal intensity of all acquired images for the calculation of the ADC.