The commonly observed relative signal increase of choline-containing compounds (tCho) in 1H MR spectra of tumors may serve as a diagnostic biomarker. Here we evaluate the potential of this tCho signal in 1H MR spectra of the human liver to assess metastases of colorectal cancers. An increased tCho signal was not observed for these metastases. With increasing tumor volumes, the tissue levels of tCho decreased. The likely reason is a larger necrotic voxel fraction as it correlated with more higher ADC values assessed by diffusion weighted imaging. A Bland-Altman analysis revealed average repeatability in normal livers and poor repeatability in tumors.
Twelve healthy volunteers and 20 patients with colorectal liver metastases were measured twice with PRESS single voxel MR spectroscopy at 3T. We used TR 2000ms, TE 30ms, bandwidth 1000Hz, vector size 1024, voxel size 20x20x20mm3, weak water suppression and a detection frequency at -1.5ppm from the water resonance, targeting that of choline at 3.2ppm. The number of acquisitions was 132 and individual spectra were phased and frequency aligned before averaging, to correct for motion artefacts. Similar, spectra without water suppression were recorded with a detection frequency on the water resonance and 20 repetitions.
In patients, the voxels were placed in the center of the metastasis guided by conventional T1- and T2-weighted MR images. In healthy volunteers voxels were placed in liver segment 2/3, 5/6 and 7/8. Spectral quality was assessed by 3 spectroscopists in consensus and spectra were only accepted if both repeat exams were of acceptable quality. Spectra were analyzed by LCModel and tissue levels were estimated by water referencing after which they were converted to absolute tissue concentrations in mmol/kg wet weight.3 For each volunteer and patient the arithmic mean of the repeat measurements was calculated.
Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) was performed (TR 2000ms, TE 82ms, b-values: 50, 300, 600s/mm2, 2x2x6mm3 voxels, respiratory triggering) and the mean and the 90th percentile of all voxel values in a tumor ROI were calculated. Differences between metabolite contents were evaluated using Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon tests for unpaired and paired nonparametric datasets, respectively. A difference was considered statistically significant when p<0.05. The repeatability of the tCho measurements were analyzed by Bland-Altman.
After quality control we included spectra from 11 patients and 10 volunteers (Figure 1). The tCho levels of the liver segments in healthy volunteers were not significantly different and the mean (and range) for tCho concentration in liver of these volunteers was 6.9 (4.9-11.1) mmol/kg wet weight.
The tCho tissue concentration of tumors in individual patients decreased from about 9.0 mmol/kg wet weight in the smallest 2 cm3 tumor volume to 1.5 mmol/kg wet weight in the largest 136 cm3 volume (Figure 2). This indicates a partial volume effect for the smaller tumors and therefore we separated the spectra in those from tumors larger and smaller than the voxel size (8cm3). The tCho tissue concentration calculated for the small tumors, 7.0 (3.8-9.3) mmol/kg wet weight, was comparable to that of healthy liver. The group with larger tumors was, however, significantly (p<0.01) lower: 1.5 (0.0-3.4) mmol/kg wet weight (Figure 3). To assess the nature of this difference we measured the ADC values of the voxel ROIs and observed a higher percentile of the ADC in larger lesions (Figure 4), indicating a contribution of necrosis to these lesions.
The coefficient of repeatability in volunteers, in small (<8cm3) and larger tumors in patients was respectively 2.8, 9.3, and 2.6, corresponding to fractional repeatabilities of 0.4, 1.3, and 1.7 respectively.
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