Devyani Bedekar1,2, Todd Jensen3,
Scott Rand1,4, Mark Malkin, 2,5, Jennifer Connelly,
2,5, Kathleen Schmainda, 2,6
1Radiology, Medical College of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, United States; 2Translational Brain
Tumor Research Program, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, United
States; 3Imaging Biometrics, Milwaukee, WI, United States; 4Translational
Brain Tumor Research Program, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, United States; 5Neurology,
Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, United States; 6Radiology
& Biophysics, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, United States
The
primary approach to monitoring patients with brain tumors is to obtain pre
and post-contrast T1-weighted images.
Bright areas on the pre-contrast images are suggestive of blood
products, which may be a result or treatment, and are therefore not to be
considered as enhancing lesions on the post-contrast images. However, the difference between the
brightness that exists on both the post and pre-contrast images can be quite
subtle, a condition that is occurring more frequently now with the increasing
use of anti-angiogenic agents. Therefore it is becoming increasingly
difficult to monitor patients with brain tumors simply by visually comparing
differences in enhancement. As a solution
in this report we propose an automatic method, the delta T1 method (dTM),
which is capable of detecting even
subtle enhancing tumor free of blood products, thereby enabling the automatic
creation of ROIs in a fast and reliable manner that avoids subjective
variability.