Discrimination Between Malignant and Healthy Breast Tissue Using Restriction Spectrum Imaging and MultiBand in a Screening Population

Motivation: Diffusion weighted imaging (DW-MRI) holds great potential in improving specificity of findings detected on contrast enhanced breast MRI. A breast-specific Restriction spectrum imaging (BS-RSI) has been developed and proved to be able to discriminate cancers from benign lesions and healthy breast tissue. Goal(s): To evaluate BS-RSI’s performance in differentiating malignant from healthy fibroglandular tissue in a breast cancer screening dataset (BCS). Approach: We prospectively scanned 14 BCS patients with high-resolution multishell DWI added to standard BCS clinical protocol. Results: The BS-RSI model was able to discriminate healthy tissue from cancers in all C-compartments. Impact: Differences were observed between healthy tissue and malignant lesions in all C-compartments (p<0.01). ADC values were also significantly different in cancers than in healthy issue (p=0.044).