Lymph node staging is determinant in the management of cancer patients. Noninvasive imaging modalities have limited accuracy to distinguish malignant form benign lymph nodes. For that purpose, we investigated putative nonexponential (multicompartmental) and potentially non-monotonic decay in simple multi-gradient-echo(MGE) MRI in colorectal cancer. We find that frequency offsets arising from multicompartment models distinguish malignancy from normal tissues (as identified from histopathology), while relaxation rates or fractions do not. Such experiments are potentially suggestive of a simple yet useful tool for nodal staging.
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