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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.
We propose a method for extracting physics-based biomarkers from a single multiparametric Magnetic Resonance Imaging (mpMRI) scan bearing a glioma tumor. We account for mass effect, the deformation of brain parenchyma due to the growing tumor, which on its own is an important radiographic feature but its automatic quantification remains an open problem. In particular, we calibrate a partial differential equation (PDE) tumor growth model that captures mass effect, parameterized by a single scalar parameter, tumor proliferation, migration, while localizing the tumor initiation site. The single-scan calibration problem is severely ill-posed because the precancerous, healthy, brain anatomy is unknown. To address the ill-posedness, we introduce an ensemble inversion scheme that uses a number of normal subject brain templates as proxies for the healthy precancer subject anatomy. We verify our solver on a synthetic dataset and perform a retrospective analysis on a clinical dataset of 216 glioblastoma (GBM) patients. We analyze the reconstructions using our calibrated biophysical model and demonstrate that our solver provides both global and local quantitative measures of tumor biophysics and mass effect. We further highlight the improved performance in model calibration through the inclusion of mass effect in tumor growth models -- including mass effect in the model leads to 10% increase in average dice coefficients for patients with significant mass effect. We further evaluate our model by introducing novel biophysics-based features and using them for survival analysis. Our preliminary analysis suggests that including such features can improve patient stratification and survival prediction.
Understanding the dynamics of brain tumor progression is essential for optimal treatment planning. Cast in a mathematical formulation, it is typically viewed as evaluation of a system of partial differential equations, wherein the physiological processes that govern the growth of the tumor are considered. To personalize the model, i.e. find a relevant set of parameters, with respect to the tumor dynamics of a particular patient, the model is informed from empirical data, e.g., medical images obtained from diagnostic modalities, such as magnetic-resonance imaging. Existing model-observation coupling schemes require a large number of forward integrations of the biophysical model and rely on simplifying assumption on the functional form, linking the output of the model with the image information. In this work, we propose a learning-based technique for the estimation of tumor growth model parameters from medical scans. The technique allows for explicit evaluation of the posterior distribution of the parameters by sequentially training a mixture-density network, relaxing the constraint on the functional form and reducing the number of samples necessary to propagate through the forward model for the estimation. We test the method on synthetic and real scans of rats injected with brain tumors to calibrate the model and to predict tumor progression.
Modeling of brain tumor dynamics has the potential to advance therapeutic planning. Current modeling approaches resort to numerical solvers that simulate the tumor progression according to a given differential equation. Using highly-efficient numerical solvers, a single forward simulation takes up to a few minutes of compute. At the same time, clinical applications of tumor modeling often imply solving an inverse problem, requiring up to tens of thousands forward model evaluations when used for a Bayesian model personalization via sampling. This results in a total inference time prohibitively expensive for clinical translation. While recent data-driven approaches become capable of emulating physics simulation, they tend to fail in generalizing over the variability of the boundary conditions imposed by the patient-specific anatomy. In this paper, we propose a learnable surrogate for simulating tumor growth which maps the biophysical model parameters directly to simulation outputs, i.e. the local tumor cell densities, whilst respecting patient geometry. We test the neural solver on Bayesian tumor model personalization for a cohort of glioma patients. Bayesian inference using the proposed surrogate yields estimates analogous to those obtained by solving the forward model with a regular numerical solver. The near-real-time computation cost renders the proposed method suitable for clinical settings. The code is available at https://github.com/IvanEz/tumor-surrogate.
In this work we evaluate multi-output (MO) Gaussian Process (GP) models based on the linear model of coregionalization (LMC) for estimation of biophysical parameter variables under a gap filling setup. In particular, we focus on LAI and fAPAR over rice areas. We show how this problem cannot be solved with standard single-output (SO) GP models, and how the proposed MO-GP models are able to successfully predict these variables even in high missing data regimes, by implicitly performing an across-domain information transfer.
In this article, we present a multispecies reaction-advection-diffusion partial differential equation (PDE) coupled with linear elasticity for modeling tumor growth. The model aims to capture the phenomenological features of glioblastoma multiforme observed in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. These include enhancing and necrotic tumor structures, brain edema and the so called mass effect, that is, the deformation of brain tissue due to the presence of the tumor. The multispecies model accounts for proliferating, invasive and necrotic tumor cells as well as a simple model for nutrition consumption and tumor-induced brain edema. The coupling of the model with linear elasticity equations with variable coefficients allows us to capture the mechanical deformations due to the tumor growth on surrounding tissues. We present the overall formulation along with a novel operator-splitting scheme with components that include linearly-implicit preconditioned elliptic solvers, and semi-Lagrangian method for advection. Also, we present results showing simulated MRI images which highlight the capability of our method to capture the overall structure of glioblastomas in MRIs.