SIMULATION OF HEPATOCELLULAR CARCINOMA IN MRI BY COMBINED MACROVASCULAR AND PHARMACOKINETIC MODELS

Physiological modeling is a way to better understand medical images, and to find some image markers of pathology. As far as the main hepatic tumor is concerned (hepatocellular carcinoma), the changes we try to reveal in images are mainly vascular ones. These modifications can be seen in magnetic resonance images, whose visual analysis is usually performed by radiologists in order to detect and characterize liver lesions. We propose to model i) the liver and its pathological vascular changes related to tumoral development and ii) the MRI acquisition after injection of contrast product. The hepatic vascularization is modeled from the main branches until capillaries, including several parameters characterizing the tumor. The output of this physiological model constitutes the input of the MRI simulator. This one is based on the Bloch equations and images depend on the acquisition parameters, the tissue properties (relaxation times, proton density) and the contrast product propagation