Can magnetic resonance spectroscopy differentiate malignant and benign causes of lymphadenopathy? An in-vitro approach

Lymphadenopathy continues to be a common problem to radiologists and treating physiciansbecause of the difficulty in confidently categorizing a node as being benign or malignantusing standard diagnostic techniques. The goal of our research was to assess whethermagnetic resonance (MR) spectroscopy contains the necessary information to allow differentiationof benign from malignant lymph nodes in an in-vitro approach using a modern patternrecognition method. Tissue samples from a tissue bank were analyzed on a nuclearmagnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. A total of 69 samples were studied. The samplesincluded a wide variety of malignant and benign etiologies. Using 45 samples, we initiallycreated a model which was able to predict if a certain spectrum originates from benign ormalignant lymph nodes using a pattern-recognition technique which takes into account theentire magnetic spectrum rather than single peaks alone. The remaining 24 samples wereblindly loaded in the model to assess its performance. We obtained an excellent accuracy indifferentiating benign and malignant lymphadenopathy using the model. It correctly differentiatedas malignant or benign, in a blinded fashion, all of the malignant samples (13 of 13)and 10 out of the 11 benign samples. We thus showed that magnetic spectroscopy is able todifferentiate benign from malignant causes of lymphadenopathy. [...