Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. May 18, 2017; 9(14): 657-666
Published online May 18, 2017. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v9.i14.657
Image quality and diagnostic performance of free-breathing diffusion-weighted imaging for hepatocellular carcinoma
Yukihisa Takayama, Akihiro Nishie, Yoshiki Asayama, Kousei Ishigami, Daisuke Kakihara, Yasuhiro Ushijima, Nobuhiro Fujita, Ken Shirabe, Atsushi Takemura, Hiroshi Honda
Yukihisa Takayama, Department of Radiology, Kitakyushu Municipal Medical Center, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka 802-0077, Japan
Akihiro Nishie, Yoshiki Asayama, Kousei Ishigami, Daisuke Kakihara, Yasuhiro Ushijima, Nobuhiro Fujita, Hiroshi Honda, Department of Clinical Radiology, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka 812-8582, Japan
Ken Shirabe, Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery, Gunma University, Graduate School of Medicine, Maebashi, Gunma 371-8511, Japan
Atsushi Takemura, Philips Electronics Japan, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8507, Japan
Author contributions: Takayama Y designed and performed the research and wrote the paper; Nishie A designed the research and supervised the report; Asayama Y, Ishigami K, Kakihara D, Ushijima Y and Fujita N designed the research and contributed to the analysis; Shirabe K and Takemura A provided clinical and technical advice; Honda H supervised the report.
Institutional review board statement: This study was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of the Kyushu University Hospital.
Informed consent statement: This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of our institute. The requirement for written informed consent was waived due to the retrospective nature of the study. For full disclosure, the details of the study are published on the home page of Kyushu University.
Conflict-of-interest statement: We have no financial relationships to disclose.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Akihiro Nishie, MD, PhD, Associated Professor, Department of Clinical Radiology, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kyushu University, 3-1-1 Maidashi, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka 812-8582, Japan. anishie@radiol.med.kyushu-u.ac.jp
Telephone: +81-92-6425695 Fax: +81-92-6425708
Received: November 16, 2016
Peer-review started: November 17, 2016
First decision: February 4, 2017
Revised: February 11, 2017
Accepted: April 23, 2017
Article in press: April 24, 2017
Published online: May 18, 2017
Processing time: 181 Days and 15 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: This retrospective study evaluated the image quality of free-breathing diffusion-weighted imaging (FB-DWI) of the liver and its diagnostic performance for hepatocellular carcinoma compared with respiratory-triggered DWI. The free-breathing technique is widely believed to be inappropriate for body DWI because motion artifact causes decreased image quality. However, after a modification of imaging parameters, FB-DWI showed better image quality without significantly reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the normal liver parenchyma and the lesion-to-nonlesion contrast-to-noise ratio compared to respiratory-triggering-DWI. As a result, the improvement of the image quality of FB-DWI contributed to an increased rate of detection of hepatocellular carcinoma.