ADC histogram analysis for adrenal tumor histogram analysis of apparent diffusion coefficient in differentiating adrenal adenoma from pheochromocytoma.

PURPOSE: To determine the diagnostic performance of apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) histogram analysis in diffusion-weighted (DW) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for differentiating adrenal adenoma from pheochromocytoma.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: We retrospectively evaluated 52 adrenal tumors (39 adenomas and 13 pheochromocytomas) in 47 patients (21 men, 26 women; mean age, 59.3 years; range, 16-86 years) who underwent DW 3.0T MRI. Histogram parameters of ADC (b-values of 0 and 200 [ADC200 ], 0 and 400 [ADC400 ], and 0 and 800 s/mm2 [ADC800 ])-mean, variance, coefficient of variation (CV), kurtosis, skewness, and entropy-were compared between adrenal adenomas and pheochromocytomas, using the Mann-Whitney U-test. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for the histogram parameters were generated to differentiate adrenal adenomas from pheochromocytomas. Sensitivity and specificity were calculated by using a threshold criterion that would maximize the average of sensitivity and specificity.

RESULTS: Variance and CV of ADC800 were significantly higher in pheochromocytomas than in adrenal adenomas (P < 0.001 and P = 0.001, respectively). With all b-value combinations, the entropy of ADC was significantly higher in pheochromocytomas than in adrenal adenomas (all P ≤ 0.001), and showed the highest area under the ROC curve among the ADC histogram parameters for diagnosing adrenal adenomas (ADC200 , 0.82; ADC400 , 0.87; and ADC800 , 0.92), with sensitivity of 84.6% and specificity of 84.6% (cutoff, ≤2.82) with ADC200 ; sensitivity of 89.7% and specificity of 84.6% (cutoff, ≤2.77) with ADC400 ; and sensitivity of 94.9% and specificity of 92.3% (cutoff, ≤2.67) with ADC800 .

CONCLUSION: ADC histogram analysis of DW MRI can help differentiate adrenal adenoma from pheochromocytoma.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: 3 J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2017;45:1195-1203.