Importance of patient DTI's to accurately model glioma growth using the reaction diffusion equation

Abstract

Tumor growth models based on the FisherKolmogorov reaction-diffusion equation (FK) have shown convincing results in reproducing and predicting the invasion patterns of gliomas brain tumors. Diffusion tensor images (DTIs) were suggested to model the anisotropic diffusion of tumor cells in the brain white matter. However, clinical patient-DTIs are expensive and often acquired with low resolution, which compromises the accuracy of the tumor growth models. In this work, we used the traveling wave approximation model to describe the evolution of the visible boundary of the tumor modeled by the FK equation to investigate the impact of replacing the patient DTI by (i) an isotropic diffusion map or (ii) an anisotropic high-resolution DTI atlas formed by averaging DTIs of multiple patients. We quantify the impact of replacing the patient DTI using three metrics: the shape of the simulated glioma, the estimation of the tumor growth parameters, and the prediction performance on clinical cases.