Colorectal Liver Metastases Show Similar Microvascular Characteristics for Individual Patients

The purpose of this study is to investigate the measurement of biological variation for colorectal liver metastases using DCE MRI. Such techniques can be used to obtain several parameters relating to microvascular characteristics of tissue. Here we demonstrate the ability to construct statistical similarity functions for these parameters. Key to this process is the construction of an empirical measurement model and subsequent re-mapping of the original measured data to Gaussian random variables, suitable for use in a chi-squared similarity function. We use this approach to evaluate within and between subject variation in metastases. The evidence provided suggests it may be possible to perform tumour discrimination on the basis of these variables.