Stefanie J.C.G. Hectors1,
Igor Jacobs1, Gustav J. Strijkers1, Klaas Nicolay1
1Biomedical
NMR, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of
Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
HIFU tumor treatment planning is generally performed with contrast-enhanced T1-weighted imaging. In view of possible toxicity issues of the Gd-chelate during HIFU, often a wait time is applied before start of the treatment. It was assessed whether accurate tumor delineation is also possible by multiparametric MR analysis solely based on endogenous contrast. k-means clustering was applied to T1, T2 and ADC maps of tumor-bearing mice with all feature vectors and variable numbers of clusters k. Maximum sensitivity (0.87) and specificity (0.90) were found for feature vector {T2,ADC} with k=6, indicating feasibility of tumor delineation based on endogenous MR parameters.