Corpus Callosum Wallerian Degeneration in Unilateral Brain Tumors: Evaluation with Diffusion Tensor Imaging

Sona Saksena¹, Mohammad-Reza Nazem-Zadeh², Jayant Narang¹, Lonni Schultz³, Quan Jiang², Rajan Jain¹

DTI data were acquired from twenty-seven patients with treatment nave unilateral grade IV gliomas and eleven patients with solitary brain metastasis with no midline corpus callosum (CC) infiltration with an aim to retrospectively evaluate whether DTI can demonstrate water diffusivity changes in the CC not visible on morphologic imaging. We observed significantly decreased FA values in all regions of CC in patients with GBM and metastases compared to controls. In conclusion, DTI is more sensitive than morphologic imaging in the evaluation of changes within CC in brain tumors not infiltrating the CC. However, these changes of DTI metrics in CC are due to wallerian degeneration rather than tumor infiltration as proven by our results showing similar changes in high grade gliomas as well as non-infiltrating metastases.