Tissue-type mapping of gliomas

Abstract

Purpose: To develop a statistical method of combining multimodal MRI (mMRI) of adult glial brain tumours to generate tissue heterogeneity maps that indicate tumour grade and infiltration margins. Materials and methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of mMRI from patients with histological diagnosis of glioma (n = 25). 1H Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Imaging (MRSI) was used to label regions of “pure” low- or high-grade tumour across image types. Normal brain and oedema characteristics were defined from healthy controls (n = 10) and brain metastasis patients (n = 10) respectively. Probability density distributions (PDD) for each tissue type were extracted from intensity normalised proton density and T2-weighted images, and p and q diffusion maps. Superpixel segmentation and Bayesian inference was used to produce whole-brain tissue-type maps. Results: Total lesion volumes derived automatically from tissue-type maps correlated with those from manual delineation (p 2 years (Mann Witney p = 0.0001). Regions classified from mMRI as oedema had non-tumour-like 1H MRS characteristics. Conclusions: 1H MRSI can label tumour tissue types to enable development of a mMRI tissue type mapping algorithm, with potential to aid management of patients with glial tumours. Keywords: Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), Multimodal MRI, Glioma, Nosologic imaging, Pattern recognition