  Understanding the dynamics of brain tumor progression is essential for
optimal treatment planning. Cast in a mathematical formulation, it is typically
viewed as evaluation of a system of partial differential equations, wherein the
physiological processes that govern the growth of the tumor are considered. To
personalize the model, i.e. find a relevant set of parameters, with respect to
the tumor dynamics of a particular patient, the model is informed from
empirical data, e.g., medical images obtained from diagnostic modalities, such
as magnetic-resonance imaging. Existing model-observation coupling schemes
require a large number of forward integrations of the biophysical model and
rely on simplifying assumption on the functional form, linking the output of
the model with the image information. In this work, we propose a learning-based
technique for the estimation of tumor growth model parameters from medical
scans. The technique allows for explicit evaluation of the posterior
distribution of the parameters by sequentially training a mixture-density
network, relaxing the constraint on the functional form and reducing the number
of samples necessary to propagate through the forward model for the estimation.
We test the method on synthetic and real scans of rats injected with brain
tumors to calibrate the model and to predict tumor progression.
