Abstract #2259

Heterogeneity of Vascular Permeability in Breast Lesions with Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI

Chihwa Song¹, Matthew Robert Smith¹, Yin Huang¹, Robert Jeraj¹, Sean Fain^1,2

¹Department of Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA; ²Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

We performed compartment modeling using Tofts model. Mean vascular permeability over lesions has been generally used to characterize tumors. However, tumors are known to be heterogeneous. Thus, we utilized spatial statistics and an iterative erosion method to study spatial characteristics of kinetic parameters. Results showed that vascular permeability was higher in the interior than in the periphery and the difference in permeability was larger in benign than in malignant lesions. It was also found that malignant lesions were more heterogeneous than benign lesions. Classification performance of the metrics we examined was found to be better than that of mean permeability over lesions.