Quantitative analysis of tumor vascular structure after drug treatment

This paper reports a method that aims to quantify the changes of tumour vascular structure as a result of drug treatment. The measures we have investigated to date include: vessel radii, inter-branch lengths, tortuosity and branch angles. We show that the distribution of vessel radii is better modelled as a gamma distribution as opposed to the log-normal distribution asserted by other researchers. We propose a new metric based on multiple linear regression to measure vascular tortuosity. We report statistical analyses which confirm that (as expected), at different significance levels, all the drugs we have tested (FTI, Iressa, Nelfinavir and PI-103) have positive effects in improving a tumour's vascular network. In each case, the changes are quantified.