Motivation: We are developing magnetic resonance histology (MRH) for surgical pathology to improve prostate cancer tissue sampling and analysis. Goal(s): Our goal was to measure the quantitative relationships between multi-parametric MRH signal, radiomic features, and cytometric (pathology) features in clinical prostate cancer tissues. Approach: We collected tissues from prostate cancer patients and performed high resolution MRH (40-55μm3). MRH volumes were registered to pathology at the microscopic level. Linear relationships between quantitative MRH and cytometric features were measured across the cohort. Results: We found statistically significant linear relationships between multiple tissue cytometric features and quantitative MRH, including T2 measurements, diffusion tensor scalers, and radiomic features. Impact: This research provides quantitative links between magnetic resonance histology and ground-truth histopathology in prostate cancer. Not only will this improve how we implement MRH for 3D pathology applications, we will also improve our interpretation of clinical prostate MRI.
Blocker et al. (Tue,) studied this question.