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New Horizons Session at ECR 2010 entitled ‘Functional imaging in CT: Optional or built-in? will take place from March 4 - 8, 2010 in Austria Centre, Vienna.

The fast-expanding capabilities of imaging with computed tomography ( CT ) can leave your head spinning, which seemed to be the effect on the participants at the New Horizons Session at ECR 10 entitled ‘Functional imaging in CT: Optional or built-in?’

The theme had been established at the start of the session by the first speaker, Dr. Patrik Rogalla of the University of Toronto’s Department of Medical Imaging, and served as a touchstone for Dr. Paul Stolzmann, a colleague of the chairman in Zurich.

The alternative validation processes available to oncologists are “traditional processes with rather long time points requiring a lot of patients and which are quite expensive,” she explained, where CT provides immediate verification of a clinical response to a proposed pharmaceutical.

The intense search for targeted therapies has changed the game, she said, and increasingly functional imaging with CT is being requested for Phase I trials alongside conventional morphological assessment, because the imaging increases information about the dynamics of the proposed drug.

“In Phase I trials, functional imaging is being used for testing hypotheses and to provide evidence of a targeted effect,” she said, citing numerous recent studies where investigators could demonstrate marked changes within an hour of administering the therapy.  The consistent performance of CT as an adjunct to traditional evaluations is well-established, yet enhanced CT techniques continue to merit the label of being ‘novel,’ and there remains a long road ahead before functional CT can claim scientific validation.

There are challenges as well as limitations to the potential of CT , she cautioned, and in some instances it is radiologists themselves who bear the responsibility for weakening the case for CT . “There are areas where we have done poorly in perfusion CT ,” she said, including a failure to establish standards and reproducibility of results. CT is also limited in that it measures only one aspect of tumor biology, and a significant barrier to adoption is radiation dosages for patients who are expected to undergo serial studies, “which presents us with a tall order as we move forward,” she said.

Source: ECR

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