Jacobus F.A. Jansen1, Hilda E. Stambuk2, Jason A. Koutcher1, Amita Shukla-Dave1
1Department of Medical Physics & Radiology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA; 2Department of Medical Radiology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
The objective of this study was to investigate the utility of diffusion weighted MRI for head and neck cancers in assessing whether non-Gaussian fitting of the diffusion signal decay curves obtained over an extended range of b values may better characterize the tumors than mono-exponential fitting. It was found that the non-Gaussian model provides a significantly better fit for DWI in head and neck cancer acquired over an extended b-value range. Furthermore, it yields a better estimation of a more accurate ADC (Dapp), and provides an additional parameter, Kapp, potentially with added value. This may be of importance as accurate ADC values are needed for clinical purposes especially in longitudinal studies.