Multiatlas Calibration of Biophysical Brain Tumor Growth Models with Mass Effect

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automatic 3D method for calibrating brain tumor growth models using MRI scans, effectively estimating tumor dynamics and mass effect despite unknown healthy brain anatomy.

Contribution

The study presents a novel inversion scheme utilizing multiple brain atlases for robust parameter estimation in tumor growth modeling from single MRI scans.

Findings

Calibration errors in synthetic data are 10-20%.

Method shows good quantitative agreement with observed tumors.

Qualitative agreement with mass effect observed in clinical data.

Abstract

We present a 3D fully-automatic method for the calibration of partial differential equation (PDE) models of glioblastoma (GBM) growth with mass effect, the deformation of brain tissue due to the tumor. We quantify the mass effect, tumor proliferation, tumor migration, and the localized tumor initial condition from a single multiparameteric Magnetic Resonance Imaging (mpMRI) patient scan. The PDE is a reaction-advection-diffusion partial differential equation coupled with linear elasticity equations to capture mass effect. The single-scan calibration model is notoriously difficult because the precancerous (healthy) brain anatomy is unknown. To solve this inherently ill-posed and ill-conditioned optimization problem, we introduce a novel inversion scheme that uses multiple brain atlases as proxies for the healthy precancer patient brain resulting in robust and reliable parameter estimation. We apply our method on both synthetic and clinical datasets representative of the heterogeneous spatial landscape typically observed in glioblastomas to demonstrate the validity and performance of our methods. In the synthetic data, we report calibration errors (due to the ill-posedness and our solution scheme) in the 10\%-20\% range. In the clinical data, we report good quantitative agreement with the observed tumor and qualitative agreement with the mass effect (for which we do not have a ground truth). Our method uses a minimal set of parameters and provides both global and local quantitative measures of tumor infiltration and mass effect.