ECR 2015 - personalized medicine in radiology

A. Imaging is everywhere in personalized medicine - van der Lugt

B. Personalized prevention: population-based imaging and image-based screening - Bamberg

C. Integrated diagnostics: towards one diagnostic department - Cuocolo

D. Interventional radiology: a paradigm for personalized medicine - Goldberg

Diagnosis has a prominent position in personalised medicine. Personalized medicine is: Providing the right treatment to the right patient at the right time.

Personalized or Precision medicine is the classification of individuals into subpopulations to optimize treatment. Imaging plays an important role in this classification. Furthermore, imaging can also be applied to evaluate treatment response in order to allow early correction of treatment if needed.

The ESR will in the coming weeks publish a whitepaper on the role of imaging in personalized medicine.

In case of imaging, the right imaging modality and protocol should be determined for a specific patient. ESR iGuide is developed to help clinicians to select the right modality for a specific question.

ECR 2014 - SF7b - Imaging biomarkers in cancer drug development

An area where medical imaging informatics could play a major role is imaging biomarkers. The involvement of imaging informatics in this area is not only in the image processing, but also in validation, evaluation and collection of imaging data and related quantitative data using imaging biobanks.

Imaging biomarkers are currently a hot topic, in imaging this relates to:

1. size measurement based imaging biomarkers (RECIST, mRECIST and EASL)

2. functional and molecular biomarkers (perfusion, vascular function, cellularity, cell-death, metabolism, proliferation, and target specific tracers)

there are three biomarker modalities:

1. biospecimen removed from a patient

2. biosignal measured using in vivo device

3. patient reported outcomes

Important is that biomarkers require extensive validation and standardization of acquisition, evaluation, and measurement.

The validation of imaging biomarkers however, is a very hard job. 

Imaging biomarkers should be used to better identify the patients most likely to benefit and to obtain better hypothosis testing.

problems in using imaging biomarkers include the variety in accquisition devices and the fact they are not designed for biomarker measurements.