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Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground Cerebral metastases are an increasingly common prob-lem with an incidence ten times that of primary brain tumors and the diagnosis is often made by general radi-ologists [1,2]. Traditionally MRI has been used for asses-sing the site and number of metastases, planning for surgery or radiosurgery and assessing the response to therapy [3,4]. Newer MRI techniques have been applied to help distinguish solitary cerebral metastases from mimics such as high grade glioma or abscess. One com-mon example is by measuring the ADC of the lesion but these readings have more recently been suggested to have some prognostic value as well as diagnostic [5,6]. When comparing cerebral metastases to glioma consid-erable attention has focused on the peritumoral region around the lesion [7-14]. A number of metrics fro