Abstract #3089

Simulation study investigating the effect of diffusion, susceptibility, and vessel topology in characterizing normal and tumorous vasculature using R2*

Mohammed Salman Shazeeb^1,2, Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer¹, and Bashar Issa²

¹Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, ²Department of Physics, UAE University, Al-Ain, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Brain vasculature is conventionally represented as straight cylinders when simulating BOLD contrast effects in fMRI. In reality, the vasculature is more complicated with branching and coiling especially in tumors. We applied a cylinder fork model to reflect the bifurcation, tortuosity, and size of vessels and performed simulations to study the effect of the rotation angle (ϕ) on R2* at different bifurcation angles (β), vessel diameters, diffusion constants, and susceptibility values. This model clearly showed an R2* dependence on ϕ, which could potentially be used as a tool to differentiate between normal and tumor vessels.

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