Amita Shukla-Dave1,
Yonggang Lu1, Ashok R. Shaha1, Hilda E. Stambuk1,
Andre E. Moreira1, Yousef Mazaheri1, Joseph O. Deasy1,
R. Michael Tuttle1
1Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, United States
There remains a pressing need of non-invasive imaging methods to identify patients with aggressive tumors in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). This study evaluates whether diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) has potential to stratify tumor aggressiveness in PTC. Twelve PTC patients underwent pretreatment DW-MRI at 1.5T. The ADC (apparent diffusion coefficient) and normalized ADC (nADC) were calculated from the DW-MRI data. All patients underwent surgery. Tumor aggressiveness was defined at pathology. nADC was able to differentiate between tumors with and without aggressive features. The study suggests nADC as a potential surrogate biomarker for stratifying tumor aggressiveness in PTC.