Reliability of perfusion maps in HCC patients

Evaluation of quantitative parameters about tumour perfusion, such as arterial blood flow (BFa), by CT perfusion is gaining acceptance in clinical applications. ROI based analysis can be considered the gold standard technique to derive quantitative parameters, although it does not allow to depict the heterogeneous vascularisation of tumour tissue. On the contrary, pixel by pixel analysis, which has this potentiality,leads only to qualitative depiction of tumour perfusion by means of colour scale since still lacks of robust processing methods. In this work, we propose an algorithm for parametric estimation (pixel by pixel) of BFa values and used it for the analysis of a group of seventeen patients with primary liver tumour. Then, we compared obtained BFa values with those estimated by a ROI based approach, by using the same image processing, to investigate the reliability of parametric maps computed with the algorithm developed.