Stefanie J.C.G. Hectors1, Igor Jacobs1, Gustav J. Strijkers1, Klaas Nicolay1
1Biomedical NMR, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
To advance the clinical application of HIFU treatment of malignant tumors, a time-efficient multislice multiparametric MRI protocol, consisting of quantification of T1, T2, ADC and MTR, was developed. Image clustering techniques were used to differentiate non-treated and HIFU-treated tumor tissue. Results showed that after HIFU ablation, a region emerged in which pixels were assigned to clusters identified as HIFU-treated tumor tissue. MRI parameter values in this region were significantly different from parameter values in tissue identified as non-treated tumor tissue. Furthermore, a strong correlation was observed between MRI-derived HIFU-treated tumor tissue fractions and histologically derived non-viable tumor tissue fractions.