Clinical applications of combined PET/MRI in oncology, head and neck cancer

Abstract

This thesis illustrates the clinical applications of PET/MRI in head and neck cancer. The results have been concluded from this work summarised as follow; I) Diffusion-weighted Imaging (DWI) is an effective and efficient imaging biomarker to differentiate between benign and malignant lymph nodes. II) DWI might be useful as a non-invasive imaging technique to differentiate between HPV+ and HPV- tumours. III) DWI might be useful to be used as a predictive biomarker to assess the treatment response to therapy. IV) FDG imaging parameters (Total lesion glycolysis (TLG) and metabolic tumour volume (MTV)) are useful to predict treatment response. V) no correlations were observed between DWI and FDG imaging parameters, which suggest that these imaging biomarkers have a complementary role in head and neck cancer assessment.