More articles from Functional
- Presurgical Identification of Primary Central Nervous System Lymphoma with Normalized Time-Intensity Curve: A Pilot Study of a New Method to Analyze DSC-PWI
The aims of this study were to: 1) to design a new method of postprocessing time-intensity curves, which renders normalized curves, and 2) to test its feasibility and performance on the diagnosis of primary central nervous system lymphoma. Time-intensity curves of enhancing tumor and normal-appearing white matter were obtained for each case. Enhancing tumor time-intensity curves were normalized relative to normal-appearing white matter. The authors performed pair-wise comparisons for primary central nervous system lymphoma against the other tumor type. The best discriminatory time points of the curves were obtained through a stepwise selection. Logistic binary regression was applied to obtain prediction models. A total of 233 patients were included in the study with 47 primary central nervous system lymphomas, 48 glioblastomas, 39 anaplastic astrocytomas, 49 metastases, and 50 meningiomas. The classifiers satisfactorily performed all bilateral comparisons in the test subset. They conclude that the proposed method for DSC-PWI time-intensity curve normalization renders comparable curves beyond technical and patient variability. Normalized time-intensity curves performed satisfactorily for the presurgical identification of primary central nervous system lymphoma.
- Myelin and Axonal Damage in Normal-Appearing White Matter in Patients with Moyamoya Disease
Eighteen patients with Moyamoya disease (16–55 years of age) and 18 age- and sex-matched healthy controls were evaluated with myelin-sensitive MR imaging based on magnetization transfer saturation imaging and 2-shell diffusion MR imaging. The myelin volume fraction, which reflects the amount of myelin sheath; the g-ratio, which represents the ratio of the inner (axon) to the outer (axon plus myelin) diameter of the fiber; and the axon volume fraction, which reflects axonal components, were calculated and compared between the patients and controls. Compared with the healthy controls, the patients with Moyamoya disease showed a significant decrease in the myelin and axon volume fractions in many WM regions, while the increases in the g-ratio values were not statistically significant. Correlations with cognitive performance were most frequently observed with the axon volume fraction. The authors conclude that the relationship with cognitive performance might be stronger with axonal damage than with myelin damage.