Clinical applications of molecular imaging: imaging to guide cancer therapy

Published on September 29, 2010 Reviewed on May 1, 2020   52 min

A selection of talks on Clinical Practice

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0:00
Good afternoon, this is David Mankoff, and I'll be talking to you today about clinical applications of molecular imaging. And in specific, we'll look at imaging to guide cancer therapy,
0:13
today we'll start by looking at some of the questions that arise in trying to treat cancer patients that imaging can be helpful for. And we evaluate some of the methods that we can use to address them, and then we'll go on to show some examples of recent work using cancer imaging and then specific molecular imaging to guide cancer therapy. Number one by choosing the right patients, number two by choosing the right drug that we know will get to the target, and number three, getting the right result, and number four, using imaging to try to predict outcome.
0:49
To start, we need to distinguish anatomic versus functional imaging, anatomic imaging is what most of us are used to in clinical medicine and in radiology, and are exemplified by things like CT and mammography. And here we rely on the tumor size, shape and density to be able to identify it, we also look for changes in that same size, shape and density to be able to infer response to treatment. And that's really been the gold standard for many, many years and is really what much of the current practices is based upon. Now, functional molecular imaging are a bit different in that they rely on in vivo tumor biology looking at processes such as perfusion metabolism, and more recently at the molecular features of the tumors, to be able to generate images and to be able to identify properties of tumors in particular for cancer imaging. Examples of this include MRI and PET, and I'll be focusing mostly on PET in this talk. And one of the reasons that this kind of approach would work better, we think, for evaluating changes in response to therapy, is that we would expect to see these functional molecular changes significantly precede changes in size, shape and density over the course of treatment. In addition, these type of features might be particularly helpful for trying to choose the right kind of patients and help choose the right drugs for those patients. So if we think about what are the different functional molecular imaging

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Clinical applications of molecular imaging: imaging to guide cancer therapy

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