MDCT Quantification of hepatic tumor viability for assessment of cancer therapy

Project SummaryAbstract Tumor imaging quantification is critical for diagnosisstagingand treatment evaluationand multi detector CTMDCTis the clinical imaging modality commonly used for patients diagnosed with hepatic malignancy because of its relatively low cost and wide availabilityConventional tumor quantification using either linear or volumetric measurement has demonstrated significant limitations in the evaluation of malignant liver tumors such as for hepatocellular carcinomaHCCwhen being treated with targeted antiangiogenic therapies or locoregional therapies because changes in overall tumor size do not necessarily reflect tumor response to therapyThis leads to an unmet clinical demand to develop a functional tumor quantification biomarker for effective and accurate assessment of treatment response for liver cancer patientsThe goal of this STTR project is to expand development of our functional tumor quantitative imaging biomarkerQIBnamed hepatic tumor viabilityHTVfor automated quantification of tumor viability of HCC using contrast enhanced multi phase hepatic MDCT imagesThe proposed HTV tool will be built upon existing technologies for quantitative imaging analysis of liver and liver tumors developed on the software platformDQIin theD Imaging Lab at Massachusetts General HospitalMGHand will be evaluated using the MDCT datasets ofpatients with advanced HCC treated with antiangiogenic therapies and trans arterial chemoembolizationTACEtherapies collected at MGH Cancer CenterThe specific aims of this Phase II project areDevelopment of HTV biomarkerWe will continue to enhance the HTV biomarker developed in our Phase I project to improve the accuracy of HCC tumor segmentation using machine learning classifiersand to expand the four phase MDCT imaging protocol developed in Phase I to include that of three phase MDCT by omitting pre contrast imaging for flexible adoption in clinical practiceEvaluation of HTV biomarkerWe will integrate the HTV biomarker into ourDQI platform to conduct a clinical study to evaluate the accuracy and clinical performance of the proposed HTV biomarker in the assessment of treatment response by assessingadvanced HCC cases treated with antiangiogenic and TACE therapies collected at MGH Cancer CenterandPreparation of FDAkclearance submissionWe will establish the quality management system forDQI Liver to meet FDA regulationand prepare the required documentation for FDAkclearance submissionThis aim is important for the long term project goal of clinical translation of advanced QIBs developed on theDQI Liver platform for tumor monitoring and response assessment of varied hepatic diseases on both CT and MR imagesThe successful development and validation of the proposed HTV biomarker will have a high clinical impact by providing a more effective and accurate tumor quantification tool compared to conventional size based methods for reliable assessment of tumor progression and evaluation of treatment response for patients with HCC Project Narrative Tumor imaging quantification is indispensable for diagnosisstagingand treatment evaluationand multi detector CTMDCTis often the modality used because of its relatively low cost and wide availabilityThis STTR phase II project continues to develop a quantitative imaging biomarker named hepatic tumor viabilityHTVfor automated quantification of tumor viability of hepatocellular carcinomaHCCusing multi phase hepatic MDCT imagesThe successful translation of the proposed HTV biomarker will provide a more effective and accurate tumor quantification biomarker compared to conventional tumor quantification using either linear or volumetric measurement for reliable assessment of tumor progression and evaluation of treatment response for patients with HCC