PET imaging in adaptive radiotherapy of gastrointestinal tumours.

PET imaging in adaptive radiotherapy of gastrointestinal tumours. Q J Nucl Med Mol Imaging. 2018 Jun 04;: Authors: Bulens P, Thomas M, Deroose CM, Haustermans K Abstract Radiotherapy is the standard of care in the multimodality treatment of a variety of gastrointestinal (GI) tumours, such as oesophageal cancer, gastric cancer, rectal cancer and anal cancer. Additionally, radiotherapy has served as an alternative for surgery in patients with liver cancer, cancer of the biliary tract and pancreatic cancer. Positron-emission tomography (PET), generally in combination with computed tomography (CT), has an established role in the diagnosis, response assessment and (re-)staging of several GI tumours. However, the additional value of PET in adaptive radiotherapy, i.e. during the radiation treatment course and in the delineation process, is still unclear. When performed during radiotherapy, PET aims at assessing treatment-induced variations in functional tumour volumes to reduce the radiation target volume. Moreover, in the radiation treatment planning, tumour delineation could be more accurate by incorporating PET to identify the metabolic tumour volume. This review focuses on the additional value of PET for adaptive radiotherapy protocols as well as for the target volume adaptation for individualised treatment strategies in oesophageal, gastric, pancreatic, liver, biliary tract, rectal and anal neoplasms. PMID: 29869484 [PubMed - a...
Source: Quarterly Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging - Category: Nuclear Medicine Tags: Q J Nucl Med Mol Imaging Source Type: research