Mathematical modelling of glioma growth: The use of Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data to predict the anisotropic pathways of cancer invasion

The nonuniform growth of certain forms of cancer can present significant complications for their treatment, a particularly acute problem in gliomas. A number of experimental results have suggested that invasion is facilitated by the directed movement of cells along the aligned neural fibre tracts that form a large component of the white matter. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) provides a window for visualising this anisotropy and gaining insight on the potential invasive pathways. In this paper we develop a mesoscopic model for glioma invasion based on the individual migration pathways of invading cells along the fibre tracts. Via scaling we obtain a macroscopic model that allows us to explore the overall growth of a tumour. To connect DTI data to parameters in the macroscopic model we assume that directional guidance along fibre tracts is described by a bimodal von Mises–Fisher distribution (a normal distribution on a unit sphere) and parametrised according to the directionality and degree of anisotropy in the diffusion tensors. We demonstrate the results in a simple model for glioma growth, exploiting both synthetic and genuine DTI datasets to reveal the potentially crucial role of anisotropic structure on invasion.