Abstract
Background
Intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) tissue parameters depend on the threshold b-value.
Purpose
To explore how threshold b-value impacts PF (f), Dslow (D), and Dfast (D*) values and their performance for liver fibrosis detection.
Material and Methods
Fifteen healthy volunteers and 33 hepatitis B patients were included. With a 1.5-T magnetic resonance (MR) scanner and respiration gating, IVIM data were acquired with ten b-values of 10, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 150, 200, 400, and 800 s/mm2. Signal measurement was performed on the right liver. Segmented-unconstrained analysis was used to compute IVIM parameters and six threshold b-values in the range of 40–200 s/mm2 were compared. PF, Dslow, and Dfast values were placed along the x-axis, y-axis, and z-axis, and a plane was defined to separate volunteers from patients.
Results
Higher threshold b-values were associated with higher PF measurement; while lower threshold b-values led to higher Dslow and Dfast measurements. The dependence of PF, Dslow, and Dfast on threshold b-value differed between healthy livers and fibrotic livers; with the healthy livers showing a higher dependence. Threshold b-value = 60 s/mm2 showed the largest mean distance between healthy liver datapoints vs. fibrotic liver datapoints, and a classification and regression tree showed that a combination of PF (PF < 9.5%), Dslow (Dslow < 1.239 × 10–3 mm2/s), and Dfast (Dfast < 20.85 × 10–3 mm2/s) differentiated healthy individuals and all individual fibrotic livers with an area under the curve of logistic regression (AUC) of 1.
Conclusion
For segmented-unconstrained analysis, the selection of threshold b-value = 60 s/mm2 improves IVIM differentiation between healthy livers and fibrotic livers.
Keywords
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References
Supplementary Material
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