Value of Noncontrast MR Imaging with Diffusion-weighted Imaging for Detection of Primary Small (≤ 20mm) Solid Pancreatic Tumors and Prediction of Pancreas Ductal Adenocarcinoma

With recent advances of MRI in abdominal imaging, improved performances on T2-weighted image and diffusion- weighted imaging (DWI) are achieved for pancreatic tumors. We hypothesized that diagnostic performance for detection of primary solid tumors of pancreas on noncontrast MRI with DWI could be sufficiently high and noncontrast MRI with DWI would be useful for pancreas screening. We conducted this study to determine the diagnostic performance of noncontrast MRI with DWI for detection of primary small (≤20mm) pancreatic solid tumors and prediction of ductal adenocarcinoma in comparison with pancreas CT and pancreas MRI with MR cholangiopancreatography.