Médecine Nucléaire et Radiothérapie

Towards Biological Target Volumes Definition for Radiotherapy Treatment Planning: Quo Vadis PET/CT?

Abstract

Slobodan Devic

This paper reviews efforts of incorporating FDG based PET/CT data into target volume delineation for radiotherapy treatment planning. Relationship between PET-based and CT-based volumes generally suffer from poor correlation between the two image data sets, expressed in terms of large statistical variation in gross tumor volume ratios irrespective of the thresholding method used. Future of biologically tailored target volumes for radiotherapy treatment planning might not be the replacement of CT or MRI based anatomical gross tumor volumes by PET based volumes. Instead, the two target volumes should complement each other into a complex mosaic of biological target volumes.