Facilitating Tumor Functional Assessment by Spatially Relating 3D Tumor Histology and In Vivo MRI: Image Registration Approach
Figure 5
The illustration of signal intensity correspondence between in vivo T2*-W MRI and registered 3D histology for three VOIs (e.g., necrotic-red, viable-green, and hemorrhagic-blue).
The 3D correspondence of tumor histology and in vivo MRI enables extraction of MRI characteristics for histologically defined regions. This is illustrated in scatter plot (B) and using the histogram-based probability density function of the registered histology (C) which clearly separated the different tissue types in the H&E stained images. The corresponding probability density function of in vivo 3D-T2*w MRI (A) demonstrates that viable and hemorrhagic regions cannot be separated using solely in vivo 3D-T2*w MRI signal intensities. Nevertheless, necrotic regions can be effectively separated from the other two histologically confirmed regions.