ADC estimation of lesions in diffusion-weighted MR images: A maximum-likelihood approach

In recent years, the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) of lesions obtained using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWMRI) has emerged as a potentially novel non-invasive imaging bio-marker for prediction and monitoring of anti-cancer therapy response. However, the motion in visceral organs and different variances in DWMRI measurements at different magnetic diffusion gradient values can make ADC estimation a challenging task. We propose a maximum-likelihood method for ADC estimation of lesions in DWMRI. We show through simulations that our method outperforms the standard linear-least-squares and diffusion-map methods.