FDG-PET/CT as a predictive tool for the evaluation of the aggressiveness of rectal cancer

Abstract

The rectal cancer is one of the most common cancers and cancer related death worldwide. As we enter an era of personalized medicine in which therapies are stratified according to the risk of local recurrence, distant recurrence, and treatment resistance, there is an increasing need for pre-treatment imaging methods that can non-invasively stratify high-risk patients who could benefit from more aggressive multimodal treatments. Metabolic imaging with FDG PET/CT has the fundamental advantage of allowing the functional characterization of tissues and, more specifically, the detection of foci of increased glycolysis, which has been shown to be a typical sign of tumour metabolic activity. We find no significant correlation between aggressiveness as determined by some well-known risk factors (such as histological type of rectal cancer, tumor stage, and size) and glucose metabolism as measured by FDG PET in rectal adenocarcinoma.