Chihwa Song1, Matthew Robert Smith1, Yin Huang1, Robert Jeraj1, Sean Fain1,2
1Department of Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA; 2Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
We performed compartment modeling using Tofts model. Mean vascular permeability over lesions has been generally used to characterize tumors. However, tumors are known to be heterogeneous. Thus, we utilized spatial statistics and an iterative erosion method to study spatial characteristics of kinetic parameters. Results showed that vascular permeability was higher in the interior than in the periphery and the difference in permeability was larger in benign than in malignant lesions. It was also found that malignant lesions were more heterogeneous than benign lesions. Classification performance of the metrics we examined was found to be better than that of mean permeability over lesions.