Grant: Operating Grant

It is estimated that 75,300 Canadian deaths occurred from cancer in 2009. Currently the major treatment options are radiotherapy, surgery and chemotherapy but survival rates are still poor and these therapies are all associated with serious side effects. Recently there has been an explosion of interest in new anti-cancer drugs that target the growth of new blood vessels feeding the tumour. Before these drugs can be approved for routine clinical use, trials are needed to determine whether they provide benefit over existing therapies. Medical imaging has an important role in assessing how well patients are responding to therapy. The most widely used method of measuring response is to make a simple measurement of tumour size from a CT or MRI image. Although this method has worked well for assessing drugs that have the effect of shrinking tumours, it does not help us to see whether we have successfully stopped the blood supply to the tumour. Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) does provide information about tumour function as well as size and has been shown to provide useful clinical information about tumour grade and likelihood of recurrence in a variety of cancer types. DCE-MRI involves injecting a dye into the patient that can be tracked using MRI. By measuring how quickly the dye travels into and out of a tumour we can gain valuable information for diagnosis and therapy planning. When a patient is lying in the scanner a series of images are taken and it is important that there is no movement between each image. Unfortunately it is impossible to stay completely still and some motion, for example movement due to breathing is inevitable. We are developing a computer technique to correct for this motion which will provide more accurate images and reduce the need to rescan patients. The new methodology is expected to improve the value of DCE-MRI for drug design and evaluation.