Abstract #0703

Microscopic Susceptibility Variation and Transverse Relaxation for the De Facto Brain Tumor Microvasculature

David Bonekamp¹, Eugene Kim², Barney Douglas Ward³, Jiangyang Zhang¹, Arvind P. Pathak¹

¹Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States; ²Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States; ³Department of Biophysics, Medical College of Wisconsin,, Milwaukee, WI, United States

Development of new susceptibility-based contrast MR imaging biomarkers of angiogenesis (e.g. susceptibility-based blood volume and vessel size index) requires biophysical models that incorporate accurate representations of the brain tumor vasculature to establish an accurate relationship to the molecular basis of angiogenesis. We investigate the relationship between brain tumor angiogenesis and susceptibility-based contrast MRI by incorporating the de facto brain vasculature in a state-of-the-art computational model of MR image contrast called the finite perturber method (FPM). Our simulations show substantial signal differences between regions of tumor vascularity and normal brain while enabling to study the entire vascular network of a mouse brain at the same time.