Quantifying H&E staining results, grading and predicting IDH mutation status of gliomas using hybrid multi-dimensional MRI

To assess the performance of hybrid multi-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging (HM-MRI) in quantifying hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining results, grading and predicting isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) mutation status of gliomas.

Included were 71 glioma patients (mean age, 50.17 ± 13.38 years; 35 men). HM-MRI images were collected at five different echo times (80–200 ms) with seven b-values (0–3000 s/mm²). A modified three-compartment model with very-slow, slow and fast diffusion components was applied to calculate HM-MRI metrics, including fractions, diffusion coefficients and T2 values of each component. Pearson correlation analysis was performed between HM-MRI derived fractions and H&E staining derived percentages. HM-MRI metrics were compared between high-grade and low-grade gliomas, and between IDH-wild and IDH-mutant gliomas. Using receiver operational characteristic (ROC) analysis, the diagnostic performance of HM-MRI in grading and genotyping was compared with mono-exponential models.

HM-MRI metrics F_Dvery-slow and F_Dslow demonstrated a significant correlation with the H&E staining results (p < .05). Besides, F_Dvery-slow showed the highest area under ROC curve (AUC = 0.854) for grading, while Dslow showed the highest AUC (0.845) for genotyping. Furthermore, a combination of HM-MRI metrics F_Dvery-slow and T2_Dslow improved the diagnostic performance for grading (AUC = 0.876).

HM-MRI can aid in non-invasive diagnosis of gliomas.