MR-based quantitative imaging biomarkers (QIBs) can provide anatomic and functional measures critical to the successful delivery of precision medicine by informing treatment selection, providing early non-invasive assessment of treatment response, and providing post-treatment surveillance. There are significant barriers, however, to successful implementation of such measures across imaging systems, centers, and time, including the need for phantoms (physical and digital) and standards. This presentation will provide examples of MR-based QIBs, describe key challenges to their disseminated implementation, and provide examples of approaches that a variety of agencies and organizations are taking to address those challenges.
1) Understand the opportunities for MR quantitative imaging biomarkers (QIBs) in research and clinical applications.
2) Understand key challenges of MR QIBs and current barriers to implementation, including the need for physical and digital phantoms and standards.
3) Understand some of the current strategies being developed and implemented by national and international agencies and organizations to address these challenges.
Recently, there has been an increasing focus on quantitative imaging biomarkers (QIBs), which have been defined as “objective characteristics derived from in vivo images as indicators of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes, or response to a therapeutic intervention” [1]. There are many examples of successful QIB implementation and use for research and clinical care in single centers of excellence. Successful implementation across systems, centers, and time, however, requires the development and standardization of data acquisition, data analysis, and data display techniques. Importantly, physical and digital phantoms are necessary in order to characterize and mitigate, to the degree possible, sources of bias and variance, to harmonize data across imaging platforms and time, and to develop standards and robust quality assurance programs. With such programs in place, QIBs can provide image-derived measurands with known bias and variance that can be validated with anatomically and physiologically relevant measures, including treatment response, and the heterogeneity of that response, and outcome.
In addition to QIB efforts of modality-specific scientific organizations, other national and international agencies and organizations have become increasingly involved. This presentation will focus on 1) briefly discussing selected MR-based QIBs and their applications in research and clinical applications, and 2) providing examples of efforts of national and international organizations, including the ISMRM, RSNA, NCI, and NIST, in developing physical and digital phantoms and standards necessary to translate QIBs from centers of excellence to wide spread application.