David Garbera1,
Jyoti Parikh2, Geoffrey David Charles-Edwards3
1Imaging
Sciences, King's College London, London, United Kingdom; 2Radiology,
Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, London, United Kingdom; 3Medical
Physics, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, London, United Kingdom
We analyse use of diffusion-weighted MRI (DWI) scanning, and generation of apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps, in predicting early response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) in patients with breast cancer. It is thought that perfusion effects may confound accuracy of ADC values calculated from DWI. We gathered mean ADC values from pre and mid-treatment scans by generating a region of interest around a whole lesion. Early changes in mean ADC value were correlated with eventual radiological response to NACT. Early change in mean ADC value performed better than long-axis measurements in predicting response. Only ADC maps excluding perfusion were significantly better.