Voxel-based treatment prediction of glioblastoma multiform tumor using diffusion tensor imaging

Abstract

This paper proposes a method to predict the effect of Bevacizumab therapy on Glioblastoma Multiform (GBM) tumors. The prediction is critical for effective treatment planning. The proposed method is developed and evaluated using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and post-contrast T1-weighted Magnetic Resonance Images (pc-T1-MRI) of 14 patients with GBM tumors gathered before and after the treatment. First, the proposed method calculates diffusion anisotropy indices (DAI) of all voxels in the brain. These diffusion anisotropy indices are Fractional Anisotropy (FA), Mean Diffusivity (MD), Relative Anisotropy (RA), and Volume Ratio (VR). Then, it registers post-treatment pc-T1-MRI and pre-treatment DAI maps to pre-treatment pc-T1-MRI. Next, it uses a thresholding method to segment the tumor from pc-T1-MRI studies. Comparing Gd-enhanced voxels of the pre- and post-treatment pc-T1-MRI, the DAIs of the tumor are labeled based on their response to the treatment. The voxels of 7 patients are randomly selected to train 4 classifiers (ANN, SVM, KNN, and ANFIS) and then all voxels of the other 7 patients are used to test them. For each classifier, four performance measures (sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and accuracy) are calculated. Experimental results show that the ANFIS is more accurate than the other classifiers in predicting the treatment response.