Evaluation of Amide Proton Transfer Imaging for Bladder Cancer Histopathologic Features: A Comparative Study with Diffusion- Weighted Imaging

Amide proton transfer (APT) imaging is an emerging chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST)-based MRI technique that is sensitive to mobile proteins and peptides in tissue and has drawn considerable attention in the field of cellular and molecular imaging. In the present work, our result demonstrates that APT imaging can predict tumor grade and muscular invasion in bladder cancer, the diagnostic performance for evaluating muscular invasion is better than that of diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and adding APT imaging to DWI significantly improved the diagnostic accuracy for evaluating muscular invasion versus DWI alone, thus opening new research avenues in this field.