Measurement reproducibility of perfusion fraction and pseudodiffusion coefficient derived by intravoxel incoherent motion diffusion-weighted MR imaging in normal liver and metastases

Abstract

Estimates of f and D derived from the widely used least squares IVIM fitting showed poor measurement reproducibility. Efforts should be made to improve the measurement reproducibility of perfusion-sensitive IVIM parameters.

Intravoxel incoherent motion: application in differentiation of hepatocellular carcinoma and focal nodular hyperplasia

“…Although we tried to maintain ROI location identical for best endeavors during each operation, it was inevitable that there would still be small differences between Intravoxel incoherent motion imaging for differentiating liver cancer • 267 (17)(18)(19). However, the range of the CR (Bland-Altman) in our study was smaller and reasonably acceptable compared with previous studies (20,21), which could be explained by our homogeneous ROI placement scheme.…”

Perfusion Measurement in Brain Gliomas with Intravoxel Incoherent Motion MRI

“…D* has been shown to be less reproducible than f in the liver. 24 Nevertheless, in selected cases with high image quality (which was not an inclusion criterion for this study), we were able to produce D* maps that were consistent with the known histologic diagnosis. 25 Furthermore, in a larger study with healthy volunteers over large regions of interest, a strong dependence of D* (and no statistically significant dependence of f) on the cardiac cycle could be shown.…”

Liver intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) magnetic resonance imaging: a comprehensive review of published data on normal values and applications for fibrosis and tumor evaluation

“…Rather than calculating and minimizing an error residual, the Bayesian method yields estimates of the uncertainty of each parameter in the model and uses prior distributions on PF, Dfast, and Dslow to determine the joint posterior probability over all parameters, given a set of measured b value samples (56). It has been shown in previous IVIM studies that it is more stable against signal fluctuations than least-squares fitting approach, especially when SNR is low (17,38,56).…”

“…A prerequisite to translating the growing interest in IVIM imaging into clinical applications is its accurate measurement of normative value of IVIM parameters and acceptable reproducibility across different clinical settings (13,14). Nevertheless, accurate IVIM quantification is challenging, partially due to the limited sampling and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for fast data acquisition of the liver (15)(16)(17). Even in the brain, where there is almost no motion effect, the cross-center agreement has been recently shown to be sub-optimal.…”