Interest of reference region models to monitor cancer treatment using dynamic contrast enhanced studies

Aim Dynamic Contrast Enhanced (DCE) imaging is an investigative tool to monitor cancer treatments such as antiangiogenic drugs. The difficulty of estimating an appropriate arterial input function in MRI or ultrasound for instance makes the reference region (RR) model very attractive. However it is not applicable to hepatic perfusion studies for which two input functions (hepatic artery and portal vein) have to be considered. A generalization of the RR approach to hepatic DCE studies was thus developed and validated on DCE-CT hepatic studies for which both input functions could be estimated.