Expert-validated CSF segmentation of MNI atlas enhances accuracy of virtual glioma growth patterns

A Coupled Modified Reaction Diffusion and Biomechanical Models for Cerebral Tumor Growth Modeling in Presence of Treatment

Tumor growth modeling at macroscopic level from multimodal images can help in predicting the future evolution of tumor and the treatment planning. This can be achieved using mathematical models where multi time-point images are available. In this paper, we propose a coupled modified reaction diffusion model that measures tumor invasion and infiltration with biomechanical model to consider tumor mass effect. In addition, our model considers treatment effects from radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy if any. The chemotherapy effect is included via a modified log-kill method to consider tissue heterogeneity while radiotherapy effect is considered using the linear quadratic model. We test the proposed model on both synthetic and 6 real datasets of low grade glioma cases with and without treatments. Experimental results of the proposed model on the clinical magnetic resonance images show that our model can simulate the tumor growth with good accuracy and effectively include the treatment effects.

Low grade glioma growth modeling considering chemotherapy and radiotherapy effects from magnetic resonance images

Studying tumor growth using mathematical models from magnetic resonance (MR) images is an important application that is believed to play a major role in cancer treatment by predicting tumor evolution, quantifying the response to therapy, and treatment planning. Reaction diffusion is the most popular model because of its simplicity and consistency with the biological growth process. However, most of the current growth models focus on presurgical images and likely without treatment. In this paper, we propose a new reaction diffusion model to consider the chemotherapy and radiotherapy effects on the tumor growth modelling for patients with low grade glioma. The proposed model does not consider the tensor information from diffusion tensor imaging. Instead it uses a weighted parameter to promote higher diffusivity in white matter. The radiotherapy and chemotherapy effects are considered as a loss terms in the proposed model. The preliminary results of the proposed model on synthetic and 2 real MR images show that, our model can effectively simulate tumor growth with high accuracies when treatments are administrated to low grade glioma patients.

Post-Surgery Glioma Growth Modeling from Magnetic Resonance Images for Patients with Treatment

Reaction diffusion is the most common growth modelling methodology due to its simplicity and consistency with the biological tumor growth process. However, current extensions of the reaction diffusion model lack one or more of the following: efficient inclusion of treatments' effects, taking into account the viscoelasticity of brain tissues, and guaranteed stability of the numerical solution. We propose a new model to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks. Guided by directional information derived from diffusion tensor imaging, our model relates tissue heterogeneity with the absorption of the chemotherapy, adopts the linear-quadratic term to simulate the radiotherapy effect, employs Maxwell-Weichert model to incorporate brain viscoelasticity, and ensures the stability of the numerical solution. The performance is verified through experiments on synthetic and real MR images. Experiments on 9 MR datasets of patients with low grade gliomas undergoing surgery with different treatment regimens are carried out and validated using Jaccard score and Dice coefficient. The growth simulation accuracies of the proposed model are in ranges of [0.673 0.822] and [0.805 0.902] for Jaccard scores and Dice coefficients, respectively. The accuracies decrease up to 4% and 2.4% when ignoring treatment effects and the tensor information, while brain viscoelasticity has no significant impact on the accuracies.