Bridging the Gap Between Modeling of Tumor Growth and Clinical Imaging

This chapter gives a brief overview of the biological processes involved in vascularized tumor growth, followed by a summary of recent mathematical modeling to simulate the biology of tumor growth and angiogenesis. It provides an overview of medical image analysis and describes recent efforts in the area of coupling such tumor models with imaging data. We do not discuss the research of obtaining tumor-specific information from medical imaging data, for which extensive work has been done in image processing and signal analysis. The chapter concludes with a sample simulation of vascularized tumor growth showing the critical role of vascularization in tumor invasiveness and highlighting the potential of gaining further insight into tumor behavior from a more expansive future integration of 3D tumor models with clinical imaging data.