Comparison of tumor microvasculature assessment via Ultrafast Doppler Tomography and Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Ultrasound

Assessing structural organization and dynamics of tumor blood supply is of highest interest since numerous cancer treatments rely on antiangiogenic effects. Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Ultrasound (DCE-US) is widely used in cancer research to extract quantitative parameters reflecting tumor perfusion. However, the underlying vascular structure is not revealed and local spatial fluctuations in DCE parametric maps remain unexplained. The recently introduced Ultrafast Doppler Tomography (UFD-T) has been shown able to reconstruct the 3D vascular network of a rat brain with a 100μm resolution. It is applied here to tumor vasculature imaging and quantitative hemodynamics assessment along with DCE-US to show the complementarity between the techniques.