DCE and DWI in Evaluating Grades of Gliomas

Bob Lei Hou¹, Li Meng², Sasan Karimi³, Weihua Liao², XiaoYi Wang²

MRI perfusion (DCE) has been applied in evaluating grades of gliomas. We hypothesized that micro vascularity changes related to the tumor grade can be reliably detected with DCE and that vessel permeability (i.e., leakage, ~~Ktrans) of the brain tumors increase with the grade. In this study, we used DCE perfusion and diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) techniques on a group of patients with variable grades of gliomas. Our aims were to evaluate relationships between the tumor grade and perfusion and diffusion parameters and to seek out one of the most sensitive and specific parameters for demonstrating the changes in the tumor vascularity, capillary integrity and cell density with the tumor grade. Our results from DCE and DWI suggest Ktrans (~~permeability) is the most sensitive and specific parameter for separating the low from high grade gliomas, and the threshold of Ktrans values for distinguishing the low from high grade gliomas was found as 0.8 (sensitivity= 92 & specificity=90).