Evaluating the Effect of Tissue Anisotropy on Brain Tumor Growth Using a Mechanically Coupled Reaction–Diffusion Model

Abler, Daniel; Rockne, Russell C.; Büchler, Philippe (2019). Evaluating the Effect of Tissue Anisotropy on Brain Tumor Growth Using a Mechanically Coupled Reaction–Diffusion Model. In: Tavares, J.; Fernandes, P. (eds.) New Developments on Computational Methods and Imaging in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering. Lecture Notes in Computational Vision and Biomechanics: Vol. 33 (pp. 37-48). Cham: Springer 10.1007/978-3-030-23073-9_3

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Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most frequent malignant brain tumor in adults and presents with different growth phenotypes. We use a mechanically coupled reaction–diffusion model to study the influence of structural brain tissue anisotropy on tumor growth. Tumors were seeded at multiple locations in a human MR-DTI brain atlas and their spatiotemporal evolution was simulated using the Finite Element Method. We evaluated the impact of tissue anisotropy on the model’s ability to reproduce the aspherical shapes of real pathologies by comparing predicted lesions to publicly available GBM imaging data. The impact of tissue anisotropy on tumor shape was strongly location dependent and highest for tumors in brain regions with a single dominating white matter fiber direction, such as the corpus callosum. Despite strongly anisotropic growth assumptions, all simulated tumors remained more spherical than real lesions at the corresponding anatomic location and similar volume.
These findings confirm previous simulation studies, suggesting that cell migration along WM fiber tracks is not a major determinant of tumor shape in the setting of reaction–diffusion-based tumor growth models and for most locations across the brain.

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