rCBF in brain tumours as measured by xenon enhanced CT

Heretofore, the rCBF of brain tumours has been measured by the 133Xe clearance method, but the resolving power of this method is limited and flow values measured by this method correlate poorly with the anatomical structure. On the other hand, our xenon-enhanced method has several advantages over the conventional isotope method and enables us to evaluate rCBF with a resolving power of 4 mm. With this method, we evaluated rCBF in 15 brain tumour cases and obtained the following results: Mean rCBF value of the tumour is a little lower than that of grey matter and higher than that of white matter with oedematous change. The xenon-enhanced method enables us to distinguish the demarcation between the tumour area and the surrounding oedematous area and offers useful information for determining the extent of resection in surgery. Mean lambda value of the tumour which is not obtainable in vivo by radionuclide scanning, was 1.02 +/- 0.06 for gliomas and 0.72 +/- 0.09 for metastatic tumours.