Preoperatively Grading Rectal Cancer with the Continue Time Random Walk DWI model.

This study evaluates a new pre-operatively method to grade rectal cancer based on Continue Time Random Walk (CTRW) model. The method is to calculate three parameters of the CTRW model by fitting the model with DWI signal and a series of b-values and to differentiate low- and high-grade tumors by fitting a logistic regression with different combinations of parameters. An additional k-mean clustering analysis is performed to evaluate how differentiable the low and high-grade groups are in the CTRW parameters’ phase space. Our study shows that CTRW model has the potential to accurately grade rectal cancer.