Vascular attributes and malignant brain tumors

Abstract

Many diseases affect blood vessel morphology. This report analyzes vessel attributes (tortuosity, vessel density, radius, and terminal branch count) within 5 malignant gliomas as seen by high-resolution MR. Results are compared to those in the same anatomical region of 14 normal controls. All tumor patients had marked increases in vessel tortuosity and terminal branch count. These results raise the interesting possibility of automatically defining "vessels of malignancy" within regions of interest on medical images. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.