A noninvasive, multimodality approach based on MRS and MRI techniques for monitoring intracranial brain tumor angiogenesis

The understanding of tumor oxygenation at the microvascular level in an orthotopic model may provide useful insight into tumor physiology, therapeutic response and development of protocols to study tumor behavior. In this paper the vascular status and the patho-physiological changes occurring during angiogenes is are studied in an orthotopic brain tumor model using a noninvasive multimodality approach based on near infrared (NIR) diffuse optical spectroscopy (DOS) along with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) We report a direct correlation between tumor size and intratumoral microvessel density MVD, and tumor oxygenation. The relative decrease in the oxygen saturation value with tumor growth indicates that though blood vessels infiltrate and proliferate the tumor region, a hypoxic trend is clearly present