Tonima Sumya Ali1, Thorarin Bjarnason1,
Beichen Sun1, Xueqing Lun1, Donna Senger1,2,
Peter Forsyth1,3, Jeff Dunn1,4, Joseph Ross Mitchell1,3
1University of
Quantitative
analysis of multi-echo T2 relaxation has been used to examine
micro compartmental structures in rat glioblastoma tumors. The infiltrative
nature of malignant gliomas poses a major clinical challenge in rendering
tumors incurable by conventional techniques. Recently, brain tumor initiating
cells (BTIC) have been hypothesized to represent the cell of origin for these
tumors. We analyzed 5 mouse brains in vivo inoculated with BTIC to
characterize the changes in T2 distributions for each
heterogeneous tumor. Based on the qualitative comparison between segmented
geometric mean T2 map and histology staining, 4 regions were
identified that corresponded to varying tumor cell densities.