Clinical investigations on blood perfusion in human malignancies of the pelvis and abdomen: significance for tumor therapy.

Blood flow of deep pelvic and abdominal tumors was investigated with the thermal clearance method, dynamic CT and dynamic MRI. There are good correlations between the measurement values obtained by these methods. A low flow was observed in rectal cancer and soft tissue sarcoma in contrast to pancreatic cancer and hypernephroma. The temperature increase induced by regional hyperthermia was dependent on the individual tumor blood flow. Dynamic CT can be used pretherapeutically and predict the quality of a heat treatment, which is important with regard to concepts consisting in radiotherapy or chemotherapy plus hyperthermia.