Vertebral Bone Marrow Lesions by DWI and ADC Values

MRI has a high sensitivity in delineating the pathology, its specificity is low. Osteoporotic and metastatic compression fractures may be mistaken for each other in the acute phase (Wong and Suresh, 2018). Edema in the acute phase of benign fractures may replace normal bone marrow and cause hypointense signal changes in T1-weighted images and hyperintense signal changes in T2-weighted images, at the same time taking contrast material. These changes are also typical for metastasis and cause confusion in diagnosis when only one lesion is present (Mauch et al., 2018).

Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) has recently appeared as a new method of screening in characterizing lesions without necessitating contrast material and in evaluating the vertebrae quantitatively (Lee et al., 2019) Diffusion-weighted-imaging (DWI) provides microscopic information from water protons which is not possible using conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (Partridge et al., 2017). DWI measures the random (Brownian) extra, intra and transcellular motion of water molecules (Ahlawat and Fayad, 2018) Apparent-diffusion-coefficient (ADC) is a quantitative parameter calculated from DWI that combines the effects of capillary perfusion and water diffusion (Wang et al., 2018) In a comparatively small number of surveys, ADC values have been studied in discriminating the infectious lesions from the malign lesions The utility of apparent diffusion coefficient obtained in diffusion-weighted MR imaging for the differentiation between benign and malignant vertebral lesions, and to determine the sensitivity and the specificity in differentiating benign and malignant vertebral lesions according to the optimal cutoff ADC value (Dahnert et al., 2017)