ONCOTIC project is composed of 6 sub-projects where the common denominator is the use of ICT technologies to improve diagnosis, treatment or monitoring of oncological pathologies. IMFUTEC is one of those sub-projects in which, specifically, it seeks to improve the diagnosis and monitoring of brain cancer through a software tool that allows to obtain and analyze the molecular substances that comprise it. Its objective is to know in an objective and premature way the state of the brain tissue in the presence of a possible neurological disease.

The current treatment of patients with cancer implies a better knowledge of aspects such as the molecular alterations responsible for tumor phenotype appearance, the ability of early diagnoses, the monitoring of tumor mass evolution in response to treatment and the adequacy of therapeutic strategies to molecular alterations. In this context, IMFUTEC approaches the development of a software tool for the analysis of molecular images obtained through multi-voxel magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Thanks to the multi-voxel technique, clinicians can study not only the temporal response of brain metabolites, but also its spatial distribution, in order to know in a precise way the area where the tumor is located.

Making use of this tool, several signals obtained by proton spectroscopy can be analyzed and integrated in an interactive way to subsequently generate color maps belonging to the substances of the different anatomical areas under study. The results obtained from the spectroscopy can be fused with high resolution 3D anatomical images and, depending on the study in question, with Functional Magnetic Resonance (FMR) and/or PET images. This is an important milestone in the diagnosis and early detection of diseases such as Alzheimer’s or multiple sclerosis.