MTS. Parametric nosologic imaging for solid tumours

Elies Fuster Garcia

Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia, Spain

Research
Multiparametric Tissue Signature (MTS) is a new procedure for solid tumours, where using the imaging data collected during the standard protocol, we are able to generate sub-compartments within the morphologic regions of the tumour with distinctive physiological features.

MTS has been tested on highly aggressive and diffuse tumours where the rapid evolution of the disease difficults the assessment of therapies, the prognosis, and avoid the early use of second line therapies. The first results obtained suggest a correlation of the MTS with patient survival.

With an extended clinical validation of this finding, MTS could constitute a useful tool to improve the efficacy of solid tumour clinical trials speeding up the identification of new therapeutic compounds. by supporting the precision recruitment of patients, the early treatment assessment, and the definition of surrogate outcomes to overall survival.

Aim
To support the precision recruitment of patients during clinical trials.
To generate novel evidences on the tumour extent to support the early treatment assessment.
To generate patient-specific surrogate metrics for late outcomes (e.g. patient overal survival).

Problem to Solve
The proportion of compounds that finally reach the market is estimated to be less than 10%, with highly expensive and lenghtly clinical trials. In the case of highly aggressive and diffusive tumours, the nature and severity of the disease greatly complicates the development of novel therapeutic compounds.

Innovation
Surrogate outcomes, such as MTS imagining, could be used in the development of patient-specific metrics, substantially contributing to the reduction in the duration of clinical trials for novel therapeutic approaches. MTS could constitute a reference surrogated metric for early therapy assessment of aggressive brain tumours such as glioblastoma.

Level of Innovation
Currently, there are very few technologies able to perform novel imaging biomarker analytics based on advanced unsupervised segmentation algorithms such as the proposed in MTS imaging. In addition, MTS computed at early stages of disease has been found to correlate with key outcomes such as patient survival. Therefore, MTS is a promising technology to be used as surrogate outcomes in the development of novel therapeutic strategies for solid tumours.