Analysis of vascular dysregulation caused by infiltrating glioma cells using bold fMRI.

Malignant glioma is a brain malignancy that can infiltrate into surrounding tissues causing disruption in cerebral blood flow. It is important to identify the regions of vascular dysregulation that may aid to detect the tumor spread. Also, the strength of functional connectivity within the tumor has prognostic value. The purpose of this study was to identify the vascular dysfunction caused by glioma with the help of blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI). Multiple linear regression was performed to identify the regions correlated with tumor cells. Functionally intact voxels within the tumor and the presence of Gaussian noise in BOLD fMRI images were the challenges faced to find an efficient representation for regressors. To address these challenges, we found a better representation for regressors using regional homogeneity maps derived from the tumor and control regions and was tested on images contaminated with Gaussian noise. The proposed method resulted in an improved D prime value of 2.3 which indicates the reliability of our method when compared with the state-of-the-art method.