Table 1.
MRI sequence parameters for FloCo and monopolar DWI sequences.
Fig 1.
Footnote: FloCo = Flow-compensated. DWI = diffusion-weighted imaging.
Table 2.
Patient demographics and disease characteristics.
Fig 2.
Diffusion-weighted b800 images of the liver in a 42-year-old patient with metastatic medullary thyroid carcinoma.
Three adjacent slices, left-side flow-compensated (FloCo), right-side conventional monopolar diffusion encoding. There are considerable pulsation artifacts with monopolar diffusion encoding, which mask focal lesions in the left liver lobe (thick arrows). One of the arrow-marked small lesions was not reported by either of the two readers in the monopolar dataset. The other arrow-marked small lesion was not reported by one of the readers in the monopolar dataset.
Fig 3.
Diffusion-weighted b800 images of the liver in a 39-year-old patient with a metastatic neuroendocrine tumor of the jejunum.
Four adjacent slices, left-side flow-compensated (FloCo), right-side monopolar diffusion encoding. The arrow-marked large lesion was detected by both readers but is much less visible in the monopolar dataset.
Fig 4.
Diffusion-weighted b800 images of the liver in a 61-year-old patient with a metastatic neuroendocrine tumor of the ileum.
Four adjacent slices, left-side flow-compensated (FloCo), right-side monopolar diffusion encoding. The arrow-marked small lesion was not reported by either of the two readers in the monopolar dataset. The adjacent lesion is barely visible in the monopolar dataset.
Fig 5.
Diffusion-weighted b800 images of the liver in a 70-year-old patient with a metastatic neuroendocrine tumor of unknown primary.
Four adjacent slices, left-side flow-compensated (FloCo), right-side monopolar diffusion encoding. The conspicuity was rated higher for the FloCo data by both readers (with a Likert score of 2).
Fig 6.
Individual subject ADC values for monopolar, FloCo, and mixed diffusion schemes.
Table 3.
Descriptive statistics of the quantitative lesion evaluation.
Fig 7.
Histograms of the qualitative lesion evaluation.
The scales in a) to d) range from 1 (worst) to 5 (best). Difference in number of visible lesions (Δlesions) is plotted in e) and calculated as number of lesions visible with flow-compensated (FloCo) minus number of lesions visible with monopolar diffusion encoding. A positive score indicates that more lesions were found with FloCo diffusion encoding.
Table 4.
Qualitative Likert score evaluation by reader 1 and reader 2 (same data as in Fig 7).
Table 5.
Lesion conspicuity and the difference in detectable lesions (Δlesions) (same data as in Fig 7).