Mathematical description of tumour re-oxygenation from repeated functional imaging: the impact of the choice of the reference region and modeling parameters

Hypoxia is often connected to treatment failure of radiotherapy, due to the higher resistance of cells to radiation when oxygen supply is reduced. The detection of tumor hypoxia with its specific localization and evolution in time could be fundamental factors for the predicting the prognosis. The aims of this work are: to improve the current method used to define maps of pO2 from PET images based on 18F-FMISO as radiotracer; to characterize mathematically the tumor re-oxygenation process.