Andreas Lemke1, Lothar Rudi Schad1, Frederik Laun2, Bram Stieltjes3
1Chair in Computer Assisted Clinical Medicine, University of Heidelberg, Faculty of Medicine, Mannheim, Germany; 2Department of Medical Physics in Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; 3Department of Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
DWI was performed to determine changes of diffusion and microperfusion in healthy pancreatic tissue and pancreatic cancer using the IVIM-approach. The perfusion fraction f, the diffusion coefficient D and the pseudo diffusion coefficient D* were extracted from six healthy volunteers and six patients with histologically proven pancreatic carcinoma and were compared to ADC values. The perfusion fraction in pancreatic carcinoma was significantly lower than in healthy pancreatic tissue (p=0.002) in contrast to D and D* (p>0.5). Also, f was more sensitive then the low b-value ADC (p=0.008). The high b-value ADC showed no significant difference (p=0.064) between the two groups.
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