Seminar Abstract

“Techniques to Perform Dynamic Contrast Enhancement Analysis for Diagnostic Purposes”

Dynamic Contrast Enhancement (DCE) is a non-invasive methodology aimed to diagnose the nature of a lesion on the base of perfusion‘s dynamic of specific contrast agents. The idea at the base of DCE is that in several pathological tissues, including tumors and inflammatory diseases, the angiogenic process is abnormal, hence the characterization of the vascularization structure may be used to support diagnosis. This approach have been successfully applied to distinguish normal versus neoplastic tissue in bone lesions and to support diagnoses of Crohn diseases. The seminar will describe the basic DCE procedures and methodologies, and will illustrate some innovative techniques that we have introduced to improve diagnostic capability. We integrate pharmacokinetic models to improve physical interpretation of data and automatic compensation of soft-tissue motion to improve the accuracy of the method. We will illustrate a tool, named DyCoH, specifically devoted to perform DCE analysis and some prototype tools developed specifically to perform liver analysis which detects the HFF and lesion using a new hepatospecific contrast agent.