Effectiveness of simultaneous multislice accelerated readout-segmented echo planar imaging for the assessment of rectal cancer

Purpose: To investigate the effectiveness of simultaneous multislice (SMS) accelerated readout-segmented echo planar imaging (RESOLVE) DWI for assessing rectal cancer in the clinic.Method: Sixty consecutive histologically proven rectal cancer patients were enrolled. They all received MRI examinations, including both SMS-RESOLVE and RESOLVE sequences. Two readers visually assessed the overall image quality, distinction of anatomical structures, lesion conspicuity, and artifacts of two sequences by using a qualitative 4-point Likert scale. The quantitative ADC value, lesion contrast, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast to-noise ratio (CNR) and temporal SNR (tSNR) were independently calculated in rectal cancer on the largest slice of the tumor.Results: The scan time was shortened from 3 min and 50 s to 1 min and 47 s. The interobserver agreement of visual and quantitative assessments between the two readers was good overall. There were no differences in overall image quality, lesion conspicuity or artifact scores between the two sequences in both readers (all p > 0.05). The lesion contrast (p = 0.013) was significantly higher in SMS-RESOLVE, and the CNR was similar in the two DWIs. The scores of distinctions of anatomical structures in SMS-RESOLVE were lower (all p < 0.05) in both readers. The SNR of SMS-RESOLVE was lower than that of RESOLVE (p = 0.004), and the tSNR of SMS-RESOLVE was significantly higher (p < 0.001). The ADC value of the tumor was lower in SMS-RESOLVE (p = 0.001), but the ADC values of the normal rectal wall showed no difference between the two DWIs.Conclusion: SMS-RESOLVE allowed a substantial reduction in acquisition time while maintaining overall image quality and lesion conspicuity in rectal cancer. It also had a higher contrast of the lesion and a higher temporal SNR.

Automated summary

The study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of simultaneous multislice (SMS) accelerated readout-segmented echo planar imaging (RESOLVE) DWI for assessing rectal cancer in the clinic. The results showed that using SMS-RESOLVE could shorten the scan time while maintaining overall image quality and lesion conspicuity. The study also found that SMS-RESOLVE had higher lesion contrast and temporal signal-to-noise ratio (tSNR).