Reproducibility of spatial penalty-based methodologies for intravoxel incoherent motion analysis with diffusion MRI

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 14; no. 1; pp. 22811 - 16
• Main Authors: Baidya Kayal, Esha, Ganguly, Shuvadeep, Kandasamy, Devasenathipathy, Khare, Kedar, Sharma, Raju, Bakhshi, Sameer, Mehndiratta, Amit
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01.10.2024; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/705/794; 692/308/2778; 692/700/1421/1628; Adolescent; Adult; Biopsy; Bone cancer; Bone Neoplasms - diagnostic imaging; Chemotherapy; Child; Diffusion coefficient; Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Female; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted - methods; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - methods; Intravoxel incoherent motion; Magnetic resonance imaging; Male; Motion; multidisciplinary; Osteosarcoma; Osteosarcoma - diagnostic imaging; Perfusion; Precision; Quantitative comparison; Reproducibility; Reproducibility of Results; Sarcoma; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Spatial analysis; Spatial penalty based IVIM method; Tumors; Variation; Young Adult; Spatial penalty based IVIM method; Quantitative comparison; Precision; Reproducibility; Intravoxel incoherent motion
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-71173-0

Objective was to assess the precision and reproducibility of spatial penalty-based intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) methods in comparison to the conventional bi-exponential (BE) model-based IVIM methods. IVIM-MRI (11 b-values; 0–800 s/mm 2 ) of forty patients (N = 40; Age = 17.7 ± 5.9 years; Male:Female = 30:10) with biopsy-proven osteosarcoma were acquired on a 1.5 Tesla scanner at 3 time-points: (i) baseline, (ii) after 1-cycle and (iii) after 3-cycles of neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Diffusion coefficient (D), Perfusion coefficient (D*) and Perfusion fraction (f) were estimated at three time-points in whole tumor and healthy muscle tissue using five methodologies (1) BE with three-parameter-fitting (BE), (2) Segmented-BE with two-parameter-fitting (BESeg-2), (3) Segmented-BE with one-parameter-fitting (BESeg-1), (4) BE with adaptive Total-Variation-penalty (BE + TV) and (5) BE with adaptive Huber-penalty (BE + HPF). Within-subject coefficient-of-variation (wCV) and between-subject coefficient-of-variation (bCV) of IVIM parameters were measured in healthy and tumor tissue. For precision and reproducibility, intra-scan comparison of wCV and bCV among five IVIM methods were performed using Friedman test followed by Wilcoxon-signed-ranks (WSR) post-hoc test. Experimental results demonstrated that BE + TV and BE + HPF showed significantly (p < 10 –3 ) lower wCV and bCV for D (wCV: 24–32%; bCV: 22–31%) than BE method (wCV: 38–49%; bCV: 36–46%) across three time-points in healthy muscle and tumor. BE + TV and BE + HPF also demonstrated significantly (p < 10 –3 ) lower wCV and bCV for estimating D* (wCV: 89–108%; bCV: 83–102%) and f (wCV: 55–60%; bCV: 56–60%) than BE, BESeg-2 and BESeg-1 methods (D*-wCV: 102–122%; D*-bCV: 98–114% and f-wCV: 96–130%; f-bCV: 94–125%) in both tumor and healthy tissue across three time-points. Spatial penalty based IVIM analysis methods BE + TV and BE + HPF demonstrated lower variability and improved precision and reproducibility in the current clinical settings.