Diagnostic Accuracy of High-Resolution Multi-Shot Diffusion-Weighted MRI for the Detection of Breast Cancer

Wouter B. Veldhuis¹, Chunlei Liu¹, Yung Do¹, Michael E. Moseley¹, Bruce L. Daniel¹

The diagnostic accuracy of multi-shot high-resolution, 256x256, diffusion-weighted (DW) MRI for the detection of breast cancer was determined in a retrospective analysis of 103 consecutive women undergoing MRI at 1.5T. DW-MRI was compared to dynamic-contrast-enhanced (DCE) sequences and to pathology and to a new approach of presenting DW-derived information in a functionally-thresholded (ft)-ADC map. It is shown that high-resolution DWI increases specificity over DCE-MRI from 45% to 81% and that ftADC-mapping further increases specificity to 93%. It is concluded that a contrast-free MRI-protocol, that includes DW imaging, may have a clinically acceptable diagnostic performance.