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Mri In Cancer: Improving Methodology For Measuring Vascular Properties And Assessing Radiation Treatment Effects In Brain, Chong Duan

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Tumors cannot survive, progress and metastasize without recruiting new blood vessels. Vascular properties, including perfusion and permeability, provide valuable information for characterizing cancers and assessing therapeutic outcomes. Dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI is a non-invasive imaging technique that affords quantitative parameters describing the underlying vascular structure of tissue. To date, the clinical application of DCE-MRI has been hampered by the lack of standardized and validated quantitative modeling approaches for data analysis.

From a therapeutic perspective, radiation therapy is a central component of the standard treatment for patients with cancer. Besides killing cancer cells, radiation also induces parenchymal and stromal changes in …