Discrimination of benign from malignant breast lesions in dense breasts with model-based analysis of regions-of-interest using directional diffusion-weighted images.

Background: There is an increasing interest in non-contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for detecting and evaluating breast lesions. We present a methodology utilizing lesion core and periphery region of interest (ROI) features derived from directional diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) data to evaluate performance in discriminating benign from malignant lesions in dense breasts.

Methods: We accrued 55 dense-breast cases with 69 lesions (31 benign; 38 cancer) at a single institution in a prospective study; cases with ROIs exceeding 7.