Differentiating Malignant Glioma from Metastasis Using Regions of Interest Generated by a Novel Diffusion Tensor Segmentation Algorithm

Timothy Lloyd Jones¹, Ai Wern Chung², Andrew John Lawrence², B Anthony Bell¹, Thomas Richard Barrick²

Difficulties can arise in clinical practice in differentiating between primary malignant glioma and brain metastasis owing to their similar appearances on conventional MRI sequences. Although previous studies have identified differences in diffusion parameters between the tumour types, the diagnostic role of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has yet to be fully elucidated. We propose an application of a novel whole brain DTI segmentation algorithm in generating regions of interest (tumour and oedema) from Diffusion Colour Maps (DCMs) created using our technique. We identify differences in diffusion between tumour types, compare our method with conventional manually drawn regions of interest and propose potential clinical applications for our method.