Advanced diffusion-weighted imaging for differentiation between cancerous and non-cancerous tissue in early therapy evaluation of cervical cancer

Cervical cancer is one of the most common cancers in women, afflicting also the young population of childbearing age.

Treatment response is evaluated at earliest 3 months after therapy completion due to the limited ability of current imaging techniques, including conventional diffusion-weighted (DW) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to distinguish tumor progression from acute therapy-induced changes.

In poorly responding patients, the 3-month window allows for disease progression and causes delays of alternative treatments. Restriction spectrum imaging (RSI) is an advanced DW-MRI technique, developed at the host department.

RSI allows for mathematical modelling of diffusion and MR properties of the signal from water molecules contained within a specific tissue of interest, where the properties reflect tissue microstructure relevant to cancer, e.g. cellularity.

As supported by preliminary results, RSI has the potential for separating cancerous and non-cancerous cervical tissue, while being insensitive to acute post-treatment changes.

The aim of this 18-month proposal is to develop a cervical cancer-specific RSI signal model using human DW-MRI data (30 healthy individuals, 30 patients).

After completion of this proposal, the RSI model will be applied in a 5-year research project at the host department, to evaluate RSI for early therapy response assessment in cervical cancer using standard-of-care positron emission tomography/computed tomography at 3 months as reference.