Spatial characteristics of Hyperpolarized Xe-129 apparent diffusion coefficient of CF patients.

Oregon Convention Center 

Microstructural lung damage is the pivotal cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with Cystic fibrosis (CF), a life-shortening genetic disorder. Detection of such lung abnormalities by examining the microstructural changes from Hyperpolarized Xe-129 MRI, are often done by calculating parameters such as apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC). We examined the spatial distribution of ADC parameter to explain the microstructural differences between healthy controls and CF patients.

Using DW-MRI images from 38 healthy controls (age: 17.2 ±9.5 year) and 39 CF patients (age: 15.28±7.62 year), we compared the spatial characteristics of 129Xe ADC in CF patients to healthy controls. Upon doing this, two random effects for the spatial and nonspatial variations in ADC maps were introduced. The prior distribution for the spatial random effect was specified using the conditional autoregressive model. This helps in understanding the microstructural changes in the lungs of CF patients by looking at the ADC map and the voxel level spatial map along with patient level spatial autocorrelation in comparison to healthy controls. The findings will be presented in the meeting.

Conditional autoregressive model

Cystic Fibrosis

apparent diffusion coefficient

MRI images 

Section on Statistics in Imaging