[Insight-users] Tumor Measurements..

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Yasser,

I'm affraid that the reason for defining tumor
shrinkage based on largest diameters is because
there is an large number of radiologist out there
that still take mearesurement directly on film or
by looking at indivial 2D slices of a CT or MRI scan.

Unfortunately, 3D has not become common in the
radiology reading rooms yet...

Once you made available tools for 3D Segmentation,
it will become evident that the rigth measure of
tumor size is the volume measured in physical units
(e.g. mm^3,  cm^3, or milliliters).

Note that for really sophisticated segmentation methods
this measurement should be weighted by tumor activity.
Meaning that the cells inside a tumor are not all
expressing tumor-related genes with the same intensity,
and therefore not all the cells inside a tumor are
displaying cancer-like behaviour.

Further development of bio-markers and gene-expression
scanning (molecular imaging) will allow to gather those
measurements using more realistic approaches.

Do not forget also that when you report measurement
they must be accompanied by the uncertainty in the
measure and the confidence of this interval.

For example,
the tumor volume should be reported as:

      30 mm^3  +/-  5 mm^3  with  95% confidence.




    Regards,


        Luis



---------------------
yasser salman wrote:

> Hi ALL..,
> To any body interested in the field of tumor
> segmentation  and measurements ,while i am doing my
> survey i found that the methods of tumor measurements
> based on the tumor’s diameter . WHO(World Health
> Organization) criteria defined a shrinkage of a tumor
> as a decrease in the product of the largest
> perpendicular diameters in the largest slice of the
> tumor. RECIST criteria defines a tumor's shrinkage as
> the decrease in the length of it's largest diameters,
> which i think will be more accurate if we calculate
> the no. of pixels in the tumor’s area (we also can
> convert it to physical coordinates in mm^2 cm^2)., 
> and what is the problems for using Pixel based. 
> can any body confirm me in this Issue or let me know
> the right way to go on Or Back OFF!
> Thanx  
> regards..,
> Yasser Salman...,
>   
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Insight-users mailing list
> Insight-users at itk.org
> http://www.itk.org/mailman/listinfo/insight-users
> 
>