Administration of chemotherapy forms one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment. Chemotherapy may be applied locoregionally in an organ or tissue. Intraperitoneal drug delivery (IPDD) is an established treatment regimen in patients with peritoneal carcinomatosis from colorectal, appendiceal, and ovarian cancer. Cancer of the pancreas is characterized by a very rigid stroma, with abundant production of hyaluronic acid (HA), resulting in an elevated Interstitial Fluid Pressure (IFP) and very poor drug penetration. Functional MRI techniques such as Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI and MR Elastography have shown great potential for non-invasive estimation of IFP.

Dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) offers the possibility to measure interstitial fluid velocity after bolus injection of a Gd based contrast agent. Combined with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling, dynamic MRI data can be used to generate detailed 3D maps of the tissue IFP distribution. Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE) is a non-invasive technique to measure tissue stiffness in vivo. Recently, a a proof-of-concept method to infer tumour pressure noninvasively using stiffness measurements from MRE and the application of nonlinear biomechanical models was published (1).