MR Multiparametric Analysis for Tumour Heterogeneity Characterisation. Framework & Initial Experiment in Liver Metastases.

Rado Andriantsimiavona¹, Martin Leach¹, Simon Doran¹, David Collins¹, Soeren Grimm², Dow-Mu Koh¹

Tissue characterisation based on multiparametric MR imaging data can be harnessed to evaluate tumour heterogeneity and their response to conventional and novel therapies. Unfortunately, no framework and application enables these complex datasets to be displayed and correlated with each other. We have built a functional imaging framework to link analysis of multimodality and multiparametric data, explore and characterise tumoural tissues types. We introduced a 3-class fuzzy classification / ternary bit combination merging method to segment tumour and identify heterogeneous tumoural areas. We applied the method to clinical trial liver metastases dataset and automatically identified necrosis among other tumoural tissue subtypes.