Heterogeneous Enhancement Pattern in DCE-MRI Reveals the Morphology of Normal Lymph Nodes: An Experimental Study

Figure 3

Precontrast (a), early (b), and late (c) DCE-MRI images (the same slice reported in Figures 1(a)–1(c) is shown) of a representative lymph node (#15). The region of interest (in yellow in (a)–(c)) was manually drawn to encompass the whole lymph node. The long-axis size of this lymph node was around 2.5 mm. k-means clustering assigned each pixel-based NDE curve (thin dashed lines) to one of the two clusters (d); cluster-averaged NDE curves are also shown (thick black continuous lines). The obtained segmentation map is shown with the corresponding colours (e).

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