Dynamic contrast imaging: protocol optimization.

Cancer is one of the principal leading causes of death worldwide, and thus it is one of the most studied diseases. Animal models have been used during centuries to increase human knowledge of these and other diseases. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is one of most commonly used techniques to retrieve non-invasively anatomical and functional information of tumors. Several works have defined the perfusion grade as an advantageous indicator for the design of new cancer therapies.

In this context, it comes up the project presented in this document. Due to the variety of protocols find in the literature to study tumor perfusion, the purpose of this project is the optimization of two Dynamic Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DMRI) protocols (for Dynamic Contrast Enhanced-MRI (DCE-MRI) and Dynamic Susceptibility Contrast MRI (DSC-MRI) techniques respectively) to evaluate pancreatic tumor perfusion in nude mice. To do that, different DMRI sequences with an administered contrast agent were tested. For the optimization of the DCE-MRI two different contrast agent doses were tested. And to optimize DSC-MRI protocol two contrast media volumes were tested.

For the evaluation and analysis of the dynamic images obtained three image processing programs were employed. One of them was used to evaluate the quality of the images obtained. And the other two were employed to obtain quantitative parameters of the dynamic images.