The purpose of our study was to compare the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) derived from diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) of prostate cancer (PCa) patients with three classes of pathological Gleason scores (GS). Patients whose GS met these criteria (GS 3 + 3, GS 3 + 4, and GS 4 + 3) were included in this study. The DWI was performed using b values of 0, 50, and 400 s/mm2 in 44 patients using an endorectal coil on a 1.5T MRI scanner. The apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) values were calculated from the DWI data of patients with three different Gleason scores. In patients with a high-grade Gleason score (4 + 3), the ADC values were lower in the peripheral gland tissue, pathologically determined as tumor compared to low grade (3 + 3 and 3 + 4). The mean and standard deviation of the ADC values for patients with GS 3 + 3, GS 3 + 4, and GS 4 + 3 were 1.135 ± 0.119, 0.976 ± 0.103 and 0.831 ± 0.087 mm2/sec. The ADC values were statistically significant (P < 0.05) between the three different scores with a trend of decreasing ADC values with increasing Gleason scores by one-way ANOVA method. This study shows that the DWI-derived ADC values may help differentiate aggressive from low-grade PCa.
Written by:
Nagarajan R, Margolis D, Raman S, Sheng K, King C, Reiter R, Thomas MA. Are you the author?
Department of Radiological Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1721, USA.
Reference: Adv Urol. 2012;2012:374805.
doi: 10.1155/2012/374805
PubMed Abstract
PMID: 22216026
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