Heterogeneity of Vascular Permeability in Breast Lesions with Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI

Introduction Dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MRI is being increasingly used to characterize abnormalities of the breast. Features of the contrast uptake and washout demonstrate high negative predictive value for identifying and characterizing breast lesions. We performed compartment modeling using the Tofts’ model [1]. Mean vascular permeability over tumor volume has been generally used to characterize tumors. However, tumors are known to be heterogeneous for many characteristics such as growth rate, metastatic potential, biochemical properties, sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agents and radio-sensitivity [2,3,4]. Therefore, it is desired to investigate spatial characteristics of kinetic parameters. In this study we utilized spatial statistics and an iterative erosion method to characterize segmented lesions based on the arrival time of contrast agent.