Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second-leading cause of cancer death in men; however, reliable tools for detection and localization are still lacking. Dynamic Contrast Enhanced UltraSound (DCE-US) is a diagnostic tool that is suitable for analysis of vascularization, by imaging an intravenously injected microbubble bolus. The localization of angiogenic vascularization associated with the development of tumors is of particular interest. Recently, methods for the analysis of the bolus convective dispersion process have shown promise to localize angiogenesis. However, independent estimation of dispersion was not possible due to the ambiguity between convection and dispersion. Therefore, in this study we propose a new method that considers the vascular network as a dynamic linear system, whose impulse response can be locally identified. To this end, model-based parameter estimation is employed, that permits extraction of the apparent dispersion coefficient (D), velocity (v), and Péclet number (Pe) of the system. Clinical evaluation using data recorded from 25 patients shows that the proposed method can be applied effectively to DCE-US, and is able to locally characterize the hemodynamics, yielding promising results (receiver-operating-characteristic curve area of 0.84) for prostate cancer localization.
Medical image analysis. 2016 Oct 01 [Epub ahead of print]
Ruud Jg van Sloun, Libertario Demi, Arnoud W Postema, Jean Jmch de la Rosette, Hessel Wijkstra, Massimo Mischi
Lab. of Biomedical Diagnostics, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. Electronic address: ., Lab. of Biomedical Diagnostics, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands., Academic Medical Center University Hospital, Amsterdam, the Netherlands., Lab. of Biomedical Diagnostics, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands; Academic Medical Center University Hospital, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.