How to See the Invisible - Linking Growth Models and Image Data to Estimating the Extent of Glioblastoma Tumors

Prof. Dr. Christian Engwer, Institut für Angewandte Mathematik, WWU

Glioblastoma Multiforme is a malignant brain tumor with poor prognosis. There have been numerous attempts to model the invasion of tumorous glioma cells via partial differential equations in the form of advection-diffusion-reaction equations. The patient-wise parametrization of these models, and their validation via experimental data has been found to be difficult, as time sequence measurements are mostly missing. Also the clinical interest lies in the actual (invisible) tumor extent for a particular MRI/DTI scan and not in a predictive estimate. Based on an instationary model with patient specific model parameters, derived from MRI/DTI scans, we present a stationalized approach to estimate the extent of glioblastoma (GBM) invasion at the time measurement. The underlying dynamics can be derived from an instationary GBM model, falling into the wide class of advection-diffusion-reaction equations. The stationalization is introduced via an analytic solution of the Fisher-KPP equation, the simplest model in the considered model class. We investigate the applicability in 1D and 2D, in the presence of inhomogeneous diffusion coefficients and on a real 3D DTI-dataset.

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