Clinical Study of Diffusion-Weighted Imaging in the Diagnosis of Liver Focal Lesion.

Apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC), derived from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance images (DW-MRI), measures the motion of water molecules in vivo and can be used to quantify tumor response so as to determine the best therapy approach. In this paper, our goal was to determine whether the DW-MRI can be used for qualitative and quantitative liver cancer analysis, where an automated method will be proposed for improving the accuracy of liver segmentation in DW-MRI to increase the ability of diagnosis of disease. We firstly analyzed the research status of liver cancer diagnosis, especially on the issues of liver image segmentation technology in MRI. Then, the imaging mechanism and image features of the DW-MRI were analyzed, and the initial DW-MRI slice was segmented by graph-cut algorithm. Finally, our obtained result from the liver DW-MRI image is quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. Experimental results show that DW-MRI has a great advantage in the diagnosis, the DWI images of benign lesion group was lower than that of malignant lesion, thus DW-MRI is segmented by graph-cut algorithm can provide important additional information regarding differential diagnosis of specific liver cancer to some extend.