Feasibility of generalised diffusion kurtosis imaging approach for brain glioma grading.

PURPOSE: An accurate differentiation of brain glioma grade constitutes an important clinical issue. Powerful non-invasive approach based on diffusion MRI has already demonstrated its feasibility in glioma grade stratification. However, the conventional diffusion tensor (DTI) and kurtosis imaging (DKI) demonstrated moderate sensitivity and performance in glioma grading. In the present work, we apply generalised DKI (gDKI) approach in order to assess its diagnostic accuracy and potential application in glioma grading. METHODS: Diffusion scalar metrics were obtained from 50 patients with different glioma grades confirmed by histological tests following biopsy or surgery. All patients were divided into two groups with low- and high-grade gliomas as grade II versus grades III and IV, respectively. For a comparison, trained radiologists segmented the brain tissue into three regions with solid tumour, oedema, and normal appearing white matter. For each region, we estimated the conventional and gDKI metrics including DTI maps. RESULTS: We found high correlations between DKI and gDKI metrics in high-grade glioma. Further, gDKI metrics enabled introduction of a complementary measure for glioma differentiation based on correlations between the conventional and generalised approaches. Both conventional and generalised DKI metrics showed quantitative maps of tumour heterogeneity and oedema behaviour. gDKI approach demonstrated largely similar sensitivity and specificity in low-high glioma differentiation as in the case of conventional DKI method. CONCLUSION: The generalised diffusion kurtosis imaging enables differentiation of low- and high-grade gliomas at the same level as the conventional DKI. Additionally, gDKI exhibited higher sensitivity to tumour heterogeneity and tissue contrast between tumour and healthy tissue and, thus, may contribute as a complementary source of information on tumour differentiation.

Line shapes of multiple quantum NMR coherences in one-dimensional quantum spin chains in solids.

General formulae for intensities of multiple quantum (MQ) NMR coherences in systems of nuclear spins coupled by the dipole-dipole interactions are derived. The second moments of the MQ coherences of zero- and second orders are calculated for infinite linear chains in the approximation of the nearest neighbor interactions. Supercomputer simulations of intensities of MQ coherences of linear chains are performed at different times of preparation and evolution periods of MQ NMR experiments. The second moments obtained from the developed theory are compared with the results of the supercomputer analysis of MQ NMR dynamics. The linewidth information in MQ NMR experiments is discussed.

Multiple quantum dynamics in linear chains and rings of nuclear spins in solids at low temperatures.

Multiple quantum spin dynamics is studied using analytical and numerical methods for one-dimensional finite systems of nuclear spins 12 coupled by dipole-dipole interactions at low temperatures. Exact expressions for intensities of multiple quantum coherences at low temperatures were obtained in the approximation of the nearest neighbor interactions. The time growth of multiple quantum coherences was analyzed numerically when all the dipole-dipole interactions in one-dimensional systems consisting of 6/8 spins were taken into account. It is shown that the growth of multiple quantum coherences gets faster when the temperature decreases, and the intensities of multiple quantum coherences can be negative at low temperatures.