Figure 7.

Panel a shows the 1.2 min DCE coronal-equivalent image of the head of animal #6. The U87 tumor is clearly visible in the left brain (right side of image), and the lesion ROI is circumscribed with a white border. Panel b shows the v_b map derived from fitting the CR first-pass DCE data (spanning the first ~ 1.2 min of acquisition) with two variable parameters: K^trans, and v_b. The tumor v_b values are elevated from those of surrounding brain parenchyma (dark blue, ~0.01). With v_b and K^trans held fixed and set as the initial guess, respectively, at the first-pass fitted values for each pixel, two parameter BALDERO fittings of the entire (~5 min.) data time-courses were performed with K^trans and v_e as variables. Panels c and d show the K^trans and v_e maps from these. The panel d map demonstrates the detectable v_e in the tumor (~0.15) and poor v_e parameter definition outside of the tumor. It is particularly interesting that K^trans is more extensively at its maximum (~ 0.17 min⁻¹) in the inferior lobe, as is v_e. The color bar at the bottom right shows the scales for all three parametric maps. The darker brown color in panel e shows human mitochondria staining of the same animal brain in a histological slice comparable to that of the DCE image slice.