Study of separation between ex vivo malignant and benign prostatic tissue using magnetic resonance electrical property tomography.

Magnetic Resonance Electrical Properties Tomography (MREPT) is an imaging modality that uses MR data to directly calculate the conductivity of the imaged object. This study evaluates if MREPT can be used to image differences between cancerous and benign prostate tissue. A total of 39 freshly excised prostates were imaged. MR data and four MREPT approaches were analyzed. Including a new MREPT approach that overlaps tiles (subdomains) resulting in an efficient approach that minimizes artifacts. No direct threshold value was found to differentiate the malignant from benign tissues. However, significance differences were found when comparing malignant and benign differences (differenced on a per slice basis), which reveals there are measurable differences between the two tissues. Ongoing work aims to develop a calibration technique and artifact mitigation technique that can exploit these differences so that malignant tissue can be robustly identified.