Breath-Hold, Respiratory-Triggered, and Free-Breathing Diffusion-Weighted MR Imaging of Renal Lesions: Comparison of Imaging Quality and Apparent Diffusion Coefficient Values

Haiyi Wang¹, Huiyi Ye¹, Jia Wang¹, Xu Zhang², Aitao Guo³, Yingwei Wang¹, Xinkun Wang¹

Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) has become an established method for abdominal imaging. The kidney is a particularly interesting organ to study with DWI. Conventional DWI requires breath-hold during scanning, which sometimes cannot be realized for patients with breath-hold difficulty. This study compares the respiratory-triggered, free-breathing and breath-hold DWI of renal lesions, and the conclusion is drawn that respiratory-triggered and free-breathing DWI can be appropriate sequences for evaluation of renal lesions without any compromise in the calculated ADC values, and free-breathing DWI can display better image quality.