Nuclear medicine and oncology

Excerpt

Medical treatment of malignant tumors has changed in the last years from nonspecific systemic chemotherapy to tumor-specific, patient-tailored therapy due to the introduction of tumor-specific pharmaceuticals interfering with intracellular biochemical pathways, affecting proliferation, signal transduction, RNA-replication, and apoptosis. Due to the fact that nuclear medicine (NM) procedures can image many of these metabolic and biochemical processes, it does not only play an incremental role in patient-tailored specific diagnostics but also in therapeutic procedures. Since the introduction of commercially available PET-CT scanners in the last 2 decades and the evolution of new, more or less specific tumor-seeking agents, it is not only possible to better detect malignant tumors and giving prognostic information, but also rendering additional information about the biochemical behavior of each tumor. Due to the ability to image receptor availability and density, glucose or amino acid metabolism, tumor hypoxia and membrane proliferation, PET has a significant impact on the therapeutic management. …