Title
A novel approach for semi-quantitative assessment of reliability of blood flow values in DCE-CT perfusion.
Abstract
In the last few years, cancer treatments have improved significantly with the introduction of new therapies aiming at reducing tumour angiogenesis, a process leading to disease progression and metastasis formation. Computed tomography perfusion (CTp) is being emerged as a promising functional technique for assessing tumour response to these new treatments, which yield a reduction of perfusion heterogeneity, occurring long before morphological reduction. However, several factors, such as noise induced by respiratory and physiological involuntary motion, prevent a reliable quantitative assessment, hence the clinical use of CTp. Currently, the assessment strategies rely on global measurements that fail in discriminating between noise and heterogeneity of tumour perfusion, both characterized by a wide value dispersion. This paper presents a new approach for reliability estimation by introducing a novel local-based index, which is able to discriminate between tumour heterogeneity, featured by locally structured patterns, and noise, characterised by sparse and unstructured values. This index enables a proper comparison between perfusion maps and can replace the parameters based on the global mean, thus improving the overall reliability of CTp studies and favouring the translation into clinical routine. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1016/j.bspc.2016.08.015
Biomedical Signal Processing and Control
Keywords
Field
DocType
Quality measure,Perfusion imaging,Quantitative imaging,Tumour,Lung,Image processing
Perfusion scanning,Biomedical engineering,Disease progression,Artificial intelligence,Quantitative assessment,Surgery,Medicine,Perfusion,Tumour heterogeneity,Pattern recognition,Blood flow,Computed tomography perfusion,Functional Technique
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
31
1746-8094
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
4
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alessandro Bevilacqua120026.45
Domenico Barone230.96
Serena Baiocco310.43
Giampaolo Gavelli452.40