Imaging is, of course, really important. I think everybody knows that because we use imaging all the time to make a diagnosis and to assess treatment response and to see whether there’s disease progression. What’s even more important is that there is a great need for imaging research and that’s something that a lot of people might not realise that, of course, imaging technologies change and that changes the way we approach our diagnostic process as well. There are so many new ways of getting information out of images as well that we really want to incorporate that into oncology in our daily clinical practice as well as, of course, in oncological trials.
What is the imaging group in EORTC aiming to achieve?
The imaging group within EORTC is a transversal group so we basically are related to all of the disease-oriented groups. So we have so-called liaisons, so people that are a member of both the imaging group and the disease-oriented group. We have multiple aims. One of the aims is to basically support the disease-oriented groups with any imaging needs that they have to make sure that they get good quality imaging within their trials. Of course, imaging is almost always part of an imaging trial for progression free survival, for instance, or even as an endpoint, a primary endpoint, as well. Of course you want the best quality imaging and the most suitable imaging for your trial, so setting up the protocols, helping with reviews or maybe finding reviewers for centrally reviewed, that’s one of the things that we do as a supportive role. But what we also want to do is be a scientific group so we initiative trials or retrospective studies within EORTC to make sure that we move the imaging field forward to have advanced imaging as part of the EORTC trials, but also use the wealth of data that is being collected in all of the trials within EORTC to basically do retrospective studies and find new ways of combining clinical data with imaging data. So fields that are known like this are radiomics where you get imaging features and you correlate it, for instance, with genetics, that’s radiogenomics, or metabolomics or any kind of way to really make those links and make diagnosis better.
What successes have been made so far?
The imaging group has done a lot. We hear about the oligometastatic disease, my colleagues work on this. One of the things that was actually accepted as a paper yesterday is that we looked at the way we could use perfusion imaging in brain tumour trials. Again, this is something that we use a lot in clinical practice but we don’t actually know whether this can be helpful in multicentre European trials. Getting that information out there, whether you can use it and how, is one of the ways… it speaks to one of the aims of the imaging group. Having this published and having this out there is one of the successes as well.
