Automated Quantification of Tumor Viability in a Rabbit Liver Tumor Model after Chemoembolization Using Infrared Imaging

The rabbit VX2 tumor is a fast-growing carcinoma model commonly used to study new therapeutic devices, such as catheter-based therapies for patients with inoperable hepatocellular carcinoma. The evaluation of tumor viability after such locoregional therapies is essential to directing hepatocellular carcinoma management. We used infrared microspectroscopy for the automatic characterization and quantification of the VX2 liver tumor viability after drug-eluting beads transarterial chemoembolization (DEB-TACE). The protocol consisted of K-means clustering followed by principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The K-means clustering was used to classify the spectra from the infrared images of control or treated tumors and to build a database of many tissue spectra. On the basis of this reference library, the PCA-LDA analysis was used to build a predictive model to identify and quantify automatically tumor viability on unknown tissue sections. For the DEB group, the LDA model determined that the surface of tumor necrosis represented 91.6% +/- 8.9% (control group: 33.1% +/- 19.6%; Mann-Whitney P = 0.0004) and the viable tumor 2.6% +/- 4% (control group: 62.2% +/- 15.2%; Mann-Whitney P = 0.0004). Tissue quantification measurements correlated well with tumor necrosis (r = 0.827, P < 0.0001) and viable tumor (r = 0.840, P < 0.0001). Infrared imaging and PCA-LDA analysis could be helpful for easily assessing tumor viability.