Abstract #4122

Threshold isocontouring on high b-value diffusion weighted images in magnetic resonance mammography

Fangrong Zong¹, Sebastian Bickelhaupt², Tristan Anselm Kuder³, Wolfgang Lederer⁴, Heidi Daniel⁵, Anne Stieber⁶, Heinz Peter Schlemmer², Xiaoliang Zhang^7,8, Petrik Galvosas⁹, and Frederik Bernd Laun¹⁰

¹The Key Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Research, Institute of Biophysics, China Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, ²Department of Radiology, German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany, ³Medical Physics in Radiology, German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany, ⁴Radiological Practice at the ATOS Clinic Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany, ⁵Radiology Centre Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany, ⁶Department of Clinical and Interventional Radiology, University Hospital Heidelberg, Mannheim, Germany, ⁷Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States, ⁸UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States, ⁹MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, School of Physical and Chemical Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand, ¹⁰Institute of Radiology, University Hospital Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Erlangen, Germany

Quantitative evaluation in clinical practice is important for accurate diagnosis, which is often difficult in breast diffusion measurements where large variability of the diffusion metrics is present. Motivated by similar appearance of malignant breast lesions in high b-value diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and positron emission tomography (PET), we propose a threshold isocontouring approach commonly used in PET to analyse breast DWI data with minimal inter-observer variability. Our results support that using a relative threshold level of 0.85 almost completely suppresses the intra- and inter-individual variability. This study suggests that the proposed approach is advantageous in the breast DWI data analysis and quantitative evaluation.

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