Andreas Lemke1, Lothar Rudi Schad1, Bram Stieltjes2, Frederik Laun3
1Chair in Computer Assisted Clinical Medicine, University of Heidelberg, Faculty of Medicine, Mannheim, Germany; 2Department of Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; 3Department of Medical Physics in Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
DWI of the abdomen was performed using a global suppression of the blood signal to investigate the vascular contribution to the measured ADC and to validate the IVIM-model. The perfusion fraction f and the diffusion coefficient D were extracted from the measured DW-data of five healthy volunteers with and without blood suppression using a biexponential fit. The perfusion fraction f in the suppressed pancreatic and liver tissue decreased significantly (p=0.008), whereas the diffusion coefficient D did not change with suppression (p>0.5). These results verify a vascular contribution to the DWI-measurement at low b-values and validate the IVIM-theory.
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