Articolo in rivista, 2018, ENG, 10.1007/s11042-017-5046-6

Pattern recognition and pharmacokinetic methods on DCE-MRI data for tumor hypoxia mapping in sarcoma

Venianaki M.; Salvetti O.; de Bree E.; Maris T.; Karantanas A.; Kontopodis E.; Nikiforaki K.; Marias K.

IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Lucca, Italy; Computational Bio-Medicine Laboratory, FORTH-ICS, Heraklion, Greece; CNR-ISTI, Pisa, Italy; Department of Surgical Oncology, Medical School of Crete University Hospital, Heraklion, Greece; Department of Radiology, Medical School - University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece; Department of Radiology, Medical School - University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece; Computational Bio-Medicine Laboratory, FORTH-ICS, Heraklion, Greece; Computational Bio-Medicine Laboratory, FORTH-ICS, Heraklion, Greece

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the intrinsic tumor physiologic characteristics in patients with sarcoma through model-free analysis of dynamic contrast enhanced MR imaging data (DCE-MRI). Clinical data were collected from three patients with two different types of histologically proven sarcomas who underwent conventional and advanced MRI examination prior to excision. An advanced matrix factorization algorithm has been applied to the data, resulting in the identification of the principal time-signal uptake curves of DCE-MRI data, which were used to characterize the physiology of the tumor area, described by three different perfusion patterns i.e. hypoxic, well-perfused and necrotic one. The performance of the algorithm was tested by applying different initialization approaches with subsequent comparison of their results. The algorithm was proven to be robust and led to the consistent segmentation of the tumor area in three regions of different perfusion, i.e. well- perfused, hypoxic and necrotic. Results from the model-free approach were compared with a widely used pharmacokinetic (PK) model revealing significant correlations.

Multimedia tools and applications (Dordrecht. Online) 77 (8), pp. 9417–9439

Keywords

Pattern recognition, Dynamic MR imaging, Biomedical image processing, Soft tissue sarcomas, Tumor hypoxia, Matrix factorization

CNR authors

Salvetti Ovidio

CNR institutes

ISTI – Istituto di scienza e tecnologie dell'informazione "Alessandro Faedo"