Simulation of water self-diffusion in breast tissue

Abstract

Diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) can be used to distinguish malignant tumour tissue from benign lesions and healthy tissue. Although this is a well established clinical method, the detailed relationship between the tissue microstructure and the measured diffusion properties like the Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC) are still under debate. During winter of 2016/2017 Ane Nordlie Johansen developed a simulation toolbox for water self-diffusion in closed geometries, and Brynjar Larssen Bakken extended this to include diffusion in the presence of solid cylinders as his project thesis during spring 2017. The main aim of this thesis is to simulate the water self diffusion in different geometrical arrangements of collagen fibres as typically found in healthy fibroglandular breast tissue (FGT), and to compare the resulting ADC with experimentally obtained values.