Characterizing Brain Tumor Microstructure with SANDI using 300 mT/m Gradients

Motivation: Precisely locating tumor regions is challenging for effective surgery and radiotherapy. Goal(s): Enhance tumorous area identification accuracy. Approach: We integrated SANDI to model both stick and spherical cell types, estimating their densities. We introduced a metric quantifying spherical cell ratio relative to total cell volume for characterizing elevated tumor cell density. Results: Our model effectively characterizes microstructural variations in brain tumor areas. The newly proposed cell number density ratio parameter provides a distinctive marker, highlighting high cell density within tumors. This approach holds promise for improving tumor localization, treatment planning, and patient outcomes. Impact: Brain tumor microstructure characterization using SANDI showed microstructure changes in tumors and edema. The introduced metric, sensitive to tumor changes, holds promise for early invasion detection, enhancing diagnostic precision.