NdH/dT: A New Quantitative Measure for Diffusion Weighted Imaging Based Evaluation of Abdominal Tumor Response to Therapy

Diffusion Weighted Imaging and the derived Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC) map can be use to quantify abdominal tumor response to therapy. Current techniques use only the tumor region mean or median ADC value. However, the actual response is more complex due to inherent tumor heterogeneity. We present a new approach to quantify the tumor's response based on entire cumulative histogram analysis. Our approach provides a single number that encapsulates the overall diffusivity changes over time. Representative results on three cases show that our measure is comparable with the radiologist qualitative evaluation.