Whole Body Quantitative, Multi-Parametric Characterisation of Tumour Heterogeneity for Response Evaluation

Mihaela Rata¹, Nina Tunariu, ², Dow M. Koh, Johann S. de Bono³, Martin O. Leach, David John Collins, Matthew D. Blackledge¹

Inter and intra-tumour heterogeneity in patients with metastatic disease poses an important challenge to anticancer therapy. A multi-parametric whole body (WB) MRI approach may combine excellent anatomic resolution with functional techniques. Our goals were: a) investigate a new methodology to assess WB tumour heterogeneity; b) validate this hypothesis on a paired pre/post treatment data. The new methodology successfully demonstrated pre and post-treatment tumour heterogeneity for two patients with different cancers. Such analysis allows observation of changes in the mean ADC and NE values after treatment for each tissue class independently and provides additional functional tumour response characterisation compared to using each method alone.