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Imaging Informatics, a research and design program, strives to help physicians and surgeons improve disease diagnosis, treatment and monitoring from the development and application of information technology.
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Brain Cancer

Though rare, brain cancers are responsible for 2% of all cancer deaths and 20% of cancers in children. 1,000 new cases are diagnosed each year in Canada We are working on methods to predict tumor genetics and response to treatment from "texture" analysis of brain MRI.

Brain Cancer

Highlights

 

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Brain cancer is a devastating disease.  Primary central nervous system (CNS) tumors, though rare, are responsible for approximately 2% of cancer deaths.  In addition, they result in 7% of the years of life lost due to cancer as they often affect children or people in middle age -- brain tumors account for 20% of malignant tumors diagnosed in children under 15.  Standard treatment for most malignant brain tumors consists of surgical resection followed by radiation therapy.

Imaging techniques, particularly magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, allow precise localization of tumors.  This enables surgeons to perform minimally invasive stereotactic biopsies and image guided surgery, resulting in more complete resection.  The Seaman Family MR Research Centre is home to the first mobile intra-operative MR scanner.  This scanner has proven its worth for surgical treatment of brain tumors, allowing more accurate and complete resection.

Imaging also allows detection of abnormalities much earlier in their development.  MR is a very sensitive diagnostic test (abnormalities are reliably detected) but is often not specific (the nature of the abnormality is ambiguous).  In the case of brain tumors, it is usually very difficult to make a firm diagnosis of tumor type based solely on imaging.  A biopsy is generally required to obtain samples for histologic or genetic investigation but this is an extremely invasive procedure.  Some of our research projects are aimed at developing imaging based tests that are capable of reliably identifying and classifying brain tumors.

 

 

Papers

  • Texture Analysis for Non-Invasive Identification of Brain Tumor Genotype from MRI. Brown RA, Zlatescu MC, Cairncross JG, Mitchell JR. Proceedings of the Fifth IASTED International Conference on Visualization, Imaging, and Image Processing (VIIP). Benidorm, Spain. ACTA Press, 480(116):459-464 (2005).

 

Abstracts

  • Towards a Non-Invasive Method for the Detection and Classification of Oligodendroglioma. Brown RA, Mitchell JR. Poster presentation by RA Brown at the Alberta Biomedical Engineering Conference.  Awarded prize for most outstanding poster presentation (2002).

 

Invited Talks

Texture Analysis for Non-Invasive Identification of Brain Tumor Genotype from MRI. Brown RA, Zlatescu MC, Cairncross JG, Mitchell JR. Invited talk, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain.
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