Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 21, 2026
Three-Dimensional Phase Resolved Functional Lung Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Published on: June 21, 2024
Fetal lung apparent diffusion coefficient measurement using diffusion-weighted MRI at 3 Tesla: Correlation with
Onur Afacan1,2, Ali Gholipour1,2, Robert V Mulkern1,2
1Department of Radiology, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Purpose:
To evaluate the feasibility of using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) to assess the fetal lung apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) at 3 Tesla (T).
Materials And Methods:
Seventy-one pregnant women (32 second trimester, 39 third trimester) were scanned with a twice-refocused Echo-planar diffusion-weighted imaging sequence with 6 different b-values in 3 orthogonal diffusion orientations at 3T. After each scan, a region-of-interest (ROI) mask was drawn to select a region in the fetal lung and an automated robust maximum likelihood estimation algorithm was used to compute the ADC parameter. The amount of motion in each scan was visually rated.
Results:
When scans with unacceptable levels of motion were eliminated, the lung ADC values showed a strong association with gestational age (P < 0.01), increasing dramatically between 16 and 27 weeks and then achieving a plateau around 27 weeks.
Conclusion:
We show that to get reliable estimates of ADC values of fetal lungs, a multiple b-value acquisition, where motion is either corrected or considered, can be performed. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2016;44:1650-1655.
