In oncology, the researchers are aiming at consolidating the development of target treatments employing antiangiogenic drugs that act on specific biological pathways in order to limit or prevent the arrival of oxygen and nutrients at tumour or metastatic sites [1]. In fact, these drugs causing a cytostatic rather than a cytotoxic effect fight against the vascular reshaping, occurring since the early phases of tumour growth [2], thus making the traditional morphological techniques unsuitable to assess such therapies response [3]. Computed Tomography perfusion (CTp) is a...

Patients and CTp study This study included 46 patients randomly chosen from one Centre of the Project PIXEL, one of the widest multicentre European study employing CTp for investigating the potential role of perfusion parameters in order to predict the development of liver metastases within three years from colorectal cancer diagnosis. All patients underwent an axial CTp liver examination, consisting of 60 CTp scans, each of 8 slices of 5-mm thickness, acquired within 2min (every 1s for the first 30s, and every 3s after), in...

Mean eBF and BF values (the latter computed with MS) results equal to [119±16]ml/min/100g and [129±27]ml/min/100g, respectively. In fact, eBF includes the contribution at the outflow, as expected. Moreover, by considering the whole cohort of 46 patients, the CV coefficient computed on eBF (CV=13%) is almost half than the one on BF with MS (CV=21%), confirming that perfusion estimates provided eBF are more precise than those of the “classical” BF. Nonetheless, correlations between eBF and BF colormaps are good, with R2≥0.90 for 36 patients and...

This work presents the eBF, a perfusion feature that allows for measurements of tissue outflow, that is also much more repeatable (almost twice) than classical BF estimates. Moreover, high correlations are present between the two BF measurements, each referred to a different state of the system. In addition, eBF permits more reliable inter-patients comparisons since the state of the system in the maximum value of the tissue signals is univocally described. eBF definitely seems a promising perfusion parameter that could benefit all CTp studies, since...

Margherita Mottola, MS - Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering "Guglielmo Marconi" (DEI), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy - Advanced Research Center on Electronic Systems for Information and Communication Technologies "Ercole De Castro" (ARCES), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy [email protected] Prof. Alessandro Bevilacqua, MS, PhD - Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy - Advanced Research Center on Electronic Systems for Information and Communication Technologies "Ercole De Castro" (ARCES), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy [email protected]

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