Multiple-pathway modeling of tumor blood flow for dynamic contrast-enhanced imaging

Tumor microvasculature is typically more tortuous with random branching of vessels, as compared with normal tissues. Multiple-pathway modeling with dynamic contrast-enhanced imaging provides a possible imaging approach for in vivo assessment of the degree of randomness associated with blood flow in the tumor vasculature. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach by addressing certain difficulties pertaining to a discrete number of pathways through the formulation of a vascular network with infinite pathways. The proposed method is applied on actual clinical datasets to further illustrate its practical implementation.