MR Breast Perfusion Analysis System (BPAS)

Given the pre- and post-contrast gadolinium magnetic resonance (MR) images of any body organ, the uptake curve estimation has diagnostic utility in the area of medicine. The rate of absorption of the contrast agent (gadolinium) by lesions can show what type of lesion it is and can also be an indication of the malignancy stage. The differences in contrast enhancement rates can be used to distinguish between benign and malignant lesions. Oncologists/radiologists and internists can classify the type of malignancy by looking at the quantitative characteristics of the tissue signal enhancement. The slopes of the uptake curve can indicate the level and type of malignancy. Such a classification is called functional segmentation. This paper presents the user-friendly MR Breast Perfusion Analysis System (BPAS), based on Motif using C/C++ and X Windows libraries, that runs on Digital Unix and XP1000 workstations supporting the Unix and Linux operating systems, respectively. We tested our software on 20 patient studies from the data collected from two major sites in the USA and Europe.