• Atsuko Arisawa, Yoshiyuki Watanabe, Hisashi Tanaka, Hiroto Takahashi, Chisato Matsuo, Takuya Fujiwara, Yasunori Fujimoto, Kouji Yamamoto, and Noriyuki Tomiyama.
• From the Departments of *Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, †Neurosurgery, and ‡Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka, Japan.
• J Comput Assist Tomogr. 2017 Nov 1; 41 (6): 910-915.

ObjectiveDynamic susceptibility contrast magnetic resonance imaging is widely used to assess glioma grade; histogram analyses are used for precise tumor perfusion evaluations. We evaluated the effect of vessel contamination in normalized cerebral blood volume (nCBV) to differentiate high- and low-grade gliomas.MethodsThirty-four patients with gliomas underwent dynamic susceptibility contrast magnetic resonance imaging. Both traditional and vessel-masked nCBV maps were constructed. Histogram analyses of whole tumors and statistical comparisons were performed to compare traditional and vessel-masked images.ResultsMean values of all the histogram metrics were lower in vessel-masked images than in traditional images. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses for every histogram metric showed a higher area under the curve for vessel-masked images than for traditional images. The integrated discrimination improvement showed that the vessel-masked images were superior to the traditional images significantly for predicting the glioma grading.ConclusionsVessel-masked nCBV maps can prevent overestimations of CBV measurements and can improve diagnostic accuracy for glioma grading.

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