A Comparative Study Between Apparent Diffusion Imaging and Correlated Diffusion Imaging for Prostate Cancer

Abstract

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men world-wide, with approximately 174,650 new cases diagnosed in 2019 in
the U.S. [1]. However, prognosis is relatively good given sufficiently
early detection during the non-metastatic stage, motivating the need
for fast and reliable cancer screening methods. Diffusion weighted
imaging is a magnetic resonance imaging technique that is gaining
traction as a noninvasive method for cancer screening. In 2013, a
new form of diffusion weighted imaging called correlated diffusion
imaging (CDI) was introduced as a potential candidate modality for
building computer-aided clinical decision support systems [2]. We
perform a large scale study, across 101 patient cases with full PI-
RADS score and histopathology, to compare the performance of
correlated diffusion imaging in prostate cancer detection and localization to apparent diffusion coefficient maps, the most commonly
used diffusion weighted imaging-derived imaging modality in can-
cer grading. Using threshold-based classification, experimental results showed that CDI achieves higher specificity at high sensitivity
values of 90% and 95%, suggesting that CDI is well suited for scenarios where high sensitivity is crucial, such as cancer screening.