Assessment of Vascularity in Malignant Glioma: Development of an Imaging Protocol at 7 T

Lars Gerigk¹, Armin Nagel², Armin Biller¹, Julien Dinkel¹, Lydia Schuster¹, Thomas Hauser¹, Michael Puderbach¹, Marco Essig¹, Stefan Delorme¹, Michael Bock²

Malignant gliomas are highly vascularized, which makes them a target for new anti-angiogenic agents. MRI therapy monitoring will require more sophisticated methods than measuring the extent of contrast enhancement, because these agents change the blood-brain-barrier. Using the advantage of 7 T, direct imaging of the tumor vasculature becomes feasible. In our newly developed clinical imaging protocol, high-resolution T2w and T1w images show the internal morphology of the lesion, whereas TOF-MRA and SWI visualize the arterial and venous intratumoral vasculature. Automatic co-registration of MRA and morphology proved to be a simple, fast and reliable method to evaluate tumor vascularization.