Skip to main content
  • Poster presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

Apparent diffusion coefficient of normal breast tissue during the menstrual cycle at 3 Tesla

Introduction

Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) is a quantitative MRI technique that provides physiological information by measuring the degree of water molecule diffusion within the extracellular space. It gives a quantitative measurement known as the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) value. The aim of the study is to show the influence of the menstrual cycle on breast ADC values and the relationship of the ADC to transverse relaxation (T2) value.

Methods

Female volunteers had one MRI scan per week over 4 weeks using a 3 T MRI scanner. The ADC of the fibroglandular tissue was measured using a single-shot SE-EPI with four b values (0, 50, 150, and 800 s/mm2). The T2 relaxation time was measured using T2w turbo spin echo (TSE) with four echo times (20, 40, 60, and 80 ms). ADC and T2 maps were generated automatically by standard Philips software.

Results

The study was performed on 11 healthy volunteers (23 to 41 years old) with a regular menstrual cycle. There is no significant difference between ADC and T2 values for the 4 weeks. Pearson's correlation coefficient indicated a negative correlation between ADC and T2 values. See Table 1.

Table 1

Conclusion

The study shows that ADC values are not affected by the normal hormonal fluctuations during the menstrual cycle.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

AlRashidi, N., Ahearn, T., Jagpal, B. et al. Apparent diffusion coefficient of normal breast tissue during the menstrual cycle at 3 Tesla. Breast Cancer Res 13 (Suppl 1), P5 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1186/bcr2957

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/bcr2957

Keywords