MR Vascular Fingerprinting with Hybrid Gradient–Spin Echo Dynamic Susceptibility Contrast MRI for Characterization of Microvasculature in Gliomas

Abstract

Characterization of tumor microvasculature is important in tumor assessment and studying treatment response. This is possible by acquiring vascular biomarkers with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) based on dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC). We propose magnetic resonance vascular fingerprinting (MRVF) for hybrid echo planar imaging (HEPI) acquired during the first passage of the contrast agent (CA). The proposed approach was evaluated in patients with gliomas, and we simultaneously estimated vessel radius and relative cerebral blood volume. These parameters were also compared to the respective values estimated using the previously introduced vessel size imaging (VSI) technique. The results of both methods were found to be consistent. MRVF was also found to be robust to noise in the estimation of the parameters. DSC-HEPI-based MRVF provides characterization of microvasculature in gliomas with a short acquisition time and can be further improved in several ways to increase our understanding of tumor physiology.

Long-term Intravital Investigation of an Orthotopic Glioma Mouse ModelviaOptical Coherence Tomography Angiography

“…Thus, visualization and monitoring the changes of tumor vasculature during glioma progression facilitate the understanding of vascular pathology about glioma and development effective therapeutic approach. Venugopal et al utilized magnetic resonance vascular fingerprinting (MRVF) method to visualize and estimate the glioma vascular parameters (vessel radius and relative cerebral blood volume) (25). With a relative quick acquisition time, MRVF allows for the characterization of vasculature in glioma, and there is potential to advance our understanding of glioma physiology.…”