NMR in cancer. X. A malignancy index to discriminate normal and cancerous tissue.

Proton nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation parameters (T1, T2, T1p) were measured on 84 normal and malignant samples of colon, lung and breast tissue at 22.5 MHz. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the ability of NMR measurements to discriminate between normal and malignant tissue. By combining T1 and T2 into a normalized NMR malignancy index, it was possible to discriminate malignant and normal tissue in all 36 colon samples, 22 out of 23 breast samples, and 26 out of 29 lung cases. Furthermore, histologically normal tissue adjacent to malignant colonic tissue was found to have an elevated NMR malignancy index comparable to that of malignant colon.