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New method for quantification of intratumoral heterogeneity: a feasibility study on Ktrans maps from preclinical
Charly Girot1, Andreas Volk2, Christine Walczak3
1Université Paris-Saclay, CEA, CNRS, Inserm, BioMaps, Gustave Roussy, 114 Rue Edouard Vaillant, 94805, Villejuif, France. Charly.girot@universite-paris-saclay.fr.
Object:
To develop new imaging biomarkers of therapeutic efficacy through the quantification of intratumoral microvascular heterogeneity.
Materials And Methods:
The described method was a combination of non-supervised clustering and extraction of intratumoral complexity features (ICF): number of non-connected objects, volume fraction. It was applied to a set of 3D DCE-MRI Ktrans maps acquired previously on tumor bearing mice prior to and on day 4 of anti-angiogenic treatment. Evolutions of ICF were compared to conventional summary statistics (CSS) and to heterogeneity related whole tumor texture features (TF) on treated (n = 9) and control (n = 6) mice.
Results:
Computed optimal number of clusters per tumor was 4. Several intratumoral features extracted from the clusters were able to monitor a therapy effect. Whereas no feature significantly changed for the control group, 6 features significantly changed for the treated group (4 ICF, 2 CSS). Among these, 5 also significantly differentiated the two groups (3 ICF, 2 CSS). TF failed in demonstrating differences within and between the two groups.
Discussion:
ICF are potential imaging biomarkers for anti-angiogenic therapy assessment. The presented method may be expected to have advantages with respect to texture analysis-based methods regarding interpretability of results and setup of standardized image analysis protocols.
