Researchers at the Biomedical Data Science Laboratory (BDSLab) of the ITACA Institute of Polytechnic University of Valencia have developed a new method based on magnetic resonance imaging that allows objectively quantifying the growth of the most aggressive brain tumors, in particular glioblastoma.
The study, published in the scientific journal Medical Physics, addresses one of the major clinical challenges in the diagnosis and treatment of this tumor: its high ability to invade healthy brain tissue.
In its research, the BDSLab team at UPV presents dynamic invasion rate (DIR), a new biomarker that can identify different patterns of tumor growth and independently predict patient survival.
Previous evaluation methods were primarily based on measuring tumor size increase or displacement of brain structures, without adequately understanding how tumors grow or their biomechanical effects on the surrounding brain. ”
Carles López Mateu, lead author of the study
The study was carried out in collaboration with researchers at Oslo University Hospital, including Carles López Mateu, María Gómez Mahíquez, F. Javier Gil Terrón, Victor Montosa y Mico, Juan M. García Gómez and Elies Fuster García.
brain biomechanics
The biomarker developed by the BDSLab-ITACA team combines the volumetric growth of a tumor over time and the mechanical effects of this growth on adjacent brain tissue. From longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging analysis, researchers created tissue compression maps that can assess how tumors compress or invade healthy tissue.
The DIR biomarker integrates both phenomena and allows differentiation between more proliferative tumors that compress the brain and more invasive tumors that spread without significant compression.
“This metric allows us to characterize the biological behavior of tumors beyond their size and provides important information about tumor aggressiveness,” said Carles López.
The method has been validated using both synthetic data and two international clinical cohorts of glioblastoma patients. The results showed that DIR can reliably stratify patients according to prognosis.
“The average survival time for patients with low DIR values is 35.2 weeks, compared to 16.0 weeks for those with high values,” emphasizes María Gómez Mahíquez, researcher at ITACA and co-author of the study.
These results demonstrate the potential of DIR as a tool to support clinical decision-making by facilitating more accurate characterization of tumor malignancy.
Aiming for more personalized medical care
The research conducted by the UPV team and Oslo University Hospital paves the way for more personalized medicine by allowing treatment strategies and follow-up protocols to be tailored to each tumor’s growth pattern.
“This is a quantitative, reproducible, non-invasive biomarker based solely on medical images that leverages an accessible methodology that enhances the role of biomedical engineering and data science in precision oncology, while facilitating its translation into future clinical settings,” the authors conclude.
sauce:
Polytechnic University of Valencia
Reference magazines:
López-Mateu, C. others. (2026). Biomechanical mapping of tumor growth: A new method to quantify glioma invasion and mass effect. medical physics. DOI: 10.1002/sq.70334. https://aapm.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mp.70334
