The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Personalized treatment approaches which optimize drugs doses according to pre-treatment and early response-to-therapy evaluation hold the promise to improve treatment success rates and reduce severe adverse side-effects due to drugs toxicity in variety of pathologies. Reliable assessment of tissue microenvironment including cell proliferation, density and size and tissue perfusion as a biomarker for disease activity is a key necessity for personalized, response-based treatment regimes. Histology-based tissue microenvironment analysis requires invasive, surgical procedure to obtain the tissue sample. Moreover, the histological analysis is limited to the obtained tissue sample which may not be sufficient in heterogeneous microenvironment. Instead, we developed the TM-MRI method utilized short-duration free-breathing diffusion-weighted MRI acquired with multiple b-values coupled with global tissue microenvironment model and reliable fitting technique that enables radiation and toxicity-free non-invasive insight into the entire three-dimensional tissue microstructure. In the lecture I’ll present the core components of this method: 1) the TM-MRI image acquisition scheme; 2) the global tissue microenvironment model, and; 3) reliable model fitting technique with intrinsic fit-quality assessment. In addition, I'll present initial clinical results of non-invasive disease activity assessment using the TM-MRI quantitative biomarkers in pediatric Crohn’s disease patients and discuss future applications of this technique.