VEROnA Image Analysis

Transarterial chemoembolisation (TACE) is a common treatment for patients with intermediate-stage hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and is also used in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). This treatment involves blocking the arteries leading to the tumours, aiming to starve them of oxygen and nutrients. Despite advances and technical refinements of TACE, including the introduction of drug-eluting beads (DEB)-TACE, tumours still recur in more than half of patients treated.

The VEROnA trial is a pilot window of opportunity study of vandetanib-eluting radiopaque embolic beads in patients with resectable liver malignancies. As the beads applied in this study are opaque to X-rays, they are visible on standard clinical CT. This raises the possibility of validating the TACE delivery, quantifying the bead dispersion in the liver and correlating the results with both patient outcomes and other imaging modalities.

Our primary research interests in this project are:

• segmentation and quantification of the embolised vasculature on CT imaging,
• registration methods for CT, perfusion CT, DCE-MRI and micro-CT of resected samples,
• investigate the use of embolised vasculature as fiducial markers for stereotactic body radiation therapy.