Revealing hidden potentials of the q-space signal in breast cancer

Abstract

Mammography screening for early detection of breast lesions currently suffers from high amounts of false positive findings, which result in unnecessary invasive biopsies. Diffusion-weighted MR images (DWI) can help to reduce many of these false-positive findings prior to biopsy. Current approaches estimate tissue properties by means of quantitative parameters taken from generative, biophysical models fit to the q-space signal under certain assumptions regarding noise and spatial homogeneity. This process is prone to fitting instability and partial information loss due to model simplicity.