ABSTRACT
Cancer treatment is often ineffective due to factors such as the inability to accurately predict outcomes to chemotherapy and the presence of diffusion barriers at the tissue scale. This chapter describes how studying the mass transport properties of tumors can give insights into the response to chemotherapy treatment of pancreatic cancer. It shows that mass transport properties of an individual human pancreatic cancer and adjacent normal pancreas could be revealed by modeling the changes in enhancement of the tissues at the specific timed phases of the test. The chapter develops a model and analysis technique that uses standard-of-care imaging for patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). It anticipates that mathematical modeling of the changes in enhancement of the tissues at sequential time points during the pancreatic protocol could quantify the mass transport properties of individual PDACs. The chapter determines whether the variability of gemcitabine incorporation in tumors among the patients could be explained by mass transport phenomena.
