REVIEWS  SPECIAL ISSUE ON PET/CT AND RADIOTHERAPY 

The Quarterly Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular imaging 2010 October;54(5):490-9

Copyright © 2010 EDIZIONI MINERVA MEDICA

lingua: Inglese

Functional target volume delineation for radiation therapy on the basis of positron emission tomography and the correlation with histopathology

Thorwarth D., Schaefer A. ✉

¹ Section for Biomedical Physics, University Hospital for Radiation Oncology, Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen, Germany; ² Department of Nuclear Medicine, Saarland University Medical Center, Homburg, Germany

Accurate target volume delineation becomes more and more important for modern high-precision radiotherapy. During the last years, molecular imaging using positron emission tomography (PET) has been shown to be of high clinical impact on diagnosis, staging and/or restaging of many malignancies. Therefore, the integration of PET-data into the radiotherapy planning process is of high interest in radio-oncology. During the last years a number of automatic and semi-automatic PET-based volume delineation methods have been developed which will be presented in this review. We will not only describe those algorithms currently used in clinical settings, but also present some of the latest developments in this highly dynamic field of research. Furthermore, validation of different segmentation approaches against histopathology is discussed.