The Importance Of Medical Oncology

Started from 1895, when Wihelm Cornrad Roentgen discovered X-rays, numerous groundbreaking findings laid the foundation for medical imaging (Riesz 1995). Since the beginning of the twentieth century, many medical imaging modalities have been used in routine clinical practice to obtain anatomical and physiological information. PET, for instance, is used for physiological imaging. Ultrasound, MRI and CT are commonly used for soft tissue structures (Weissleder and Pittet 2008). In oncology, the integrated examination (PET/CT) has gained widespread acceptance as a tool for diagnosis, staging, prognosis, treatment planning, assessment of treatment response and diagnosis of recurrence (Collins 2007, Antoch and Bockisch 2009). Although the additional …show more content…
This will result in a higher difference in resonance signals between different tissues, and hence the higher resolution MRI images (Hao, Ai et al. 2012). MRI can image tissues down to 10 μm resolution as opposed to 1-2 mm for other imaging systems such as PET as shown in Table 1. Therefore, MRI is able to provide superior soft-tissue contrast than CT. This is advantageous for better anatomical visualization of soft tissue structures, imaging the brain and the musculoskeletal system. It is beneficial for detecting a lot of cancer, such as brain tumors, head and neck cancer and liver metastases (Antoch, Vogt et al. 2003). In addition, comparing with PET/CT scans, which are acquired sequentially and can cause artifacts, acquiring PET and MRI images simultaneously enables perfect temporal coregistration of dynamic PET data acquisition and functional information provided by MRI (Pichler, Wehrl et al. 2008). Moreover, MRI does not have radiation exposure on the patient, thus the radiation dose patient received is only from the radioisotope for PET. This reduced radiation dose is more favorable than CT, which has a relatively high radiation burden (von Schulthess and Schlemmer 2009, Schiepers and Dahlbom