- Presurgical Identification of Primary Central Nervous System Lymphoma with Normalized Time-Intensity Curve: A Pilot Study of a New Method to Analyze DSC-PWI
The aims of this study were to: 1) to design a new method of postprocessing time-intensity curves, which renders normalized curves, and 2) to test its feasibility and performance on the diagnosis of primary central nervous system lymphoma. Time-intensity curves of enhancing tumor and normal-appearing white matter were obtained for each case. Enhancing tumor time-intensity curves were normalized relative to normal-appearing white matter. The authors performed pair-wise comparisons for primary central nervous system lymphoma against the other tumor type. The best discriminatory time points of the curves were obtained through a stepwise selection. Logistic binary regression was applied to obtain prediction models. A total of 233 patients were included in the study with 47 primary central nervous system lymphomas, 48 glioblastomas, 39 anaplastic astrocytomas, 49 metastases, and 50 meningiomas. The classifiers satisfactorily performed all bilateral comparisons in the test subset. They conclude that the proposed method for DSC-PWI time-intensity curve normalization renders comparable curves beyond technical and patient variability. Normalized time-intensity curves performed satisfactorily for the presurgical identification of primary central nervous system lymphoma.