A Systematic Review of Reducing Diffusion-Weighted Imaging Scan Time While Maintaining Image Quality in Human Prostate

Objective: Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is a powerful magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that evaluates the microscopic motion of water molecules in human tissues and provides critical information on tissue pathology. This systematic review aims to demonstrate methods for reducing the scan time of the DWI technique in the prostate while maintaining image quality. Methods and Materials: A search in the PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases from 2012 to 2025 was conducted for articles with topics related to reducing DWI scan time in evaluating the prostate while preserving high-quality data. DWI studies that presented full statistical analyses of reducing scan time while maintaining image quality tests of the prostate in peer-reviewed, full-text articles written in English were included. Articles with at least one of the search terms specified in the search keywords (in their titles or abstracts) were identified. Results: The studies included in this review (n = 5 studies) were assessed for different characteristics, including sample size (8–151), image quality assessment, scan time, different applied strategies for reducing the scan time while keeping a reasonable image quality, and acquisition method. The five studies used different strategies, including half-Fourier acquisition single-shot turbo spin-echo (HASTE), spatiotemporally encoding (SPEN), synthesized high-b DWI, Variational Network (VN), and complex averaging methods. The scan time was reduced in one study from 5.4 min to 1.8 min when using the VN method. The quantitative analysis was not done due to the heterogeneity of methods. Overall, the current applied strategies have allowed for fast scan times and better image quality. Conclusions: This study revealed that the application of different methods in DWI has the potential ability to reduce scan time in prostate while maintaining a reasonable image quality.