Abstract
Immunotherapy constitutes a paradigm shift in cancer treatment. Its FDA
approval for several indications has yielded improved prognosis for cases where
traditional therapy has shown limited efficiencey. However, many patients still
fail to benefit from this treatment modality, and the exact mechanisms
responsible for tumor response are unknown. Noninvasive treatment monitoring is
crucial for longitudinal tumor characterization and the early detection of
non-responders. While various medical imaging techniques can provide a
morphological picture of the lesion and its surrounding tissue, a
molecular-oriented imaging approach holds the key to unraveling biological
effects that occur much earlier in the immunotherapy timeline. Magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) is a highly versatile imaging modality, where the image
contrast can be tailored to emphasize a particular biophysical property of
interest using advanced engineering of the imaging pipeline. In this review,
recent advances in molecular-MRI based cancer immunotherapy monitoring are
described. Next, the presentation of the underlying physics, computational, and
biological features are complemented by a critical analysis of the results
obtained in preclinical and clinical studies. Finally, emerging artificial
intelligence (AI)-based strategies to further distill, quantify, and interpret
the image-based molecular MRI information are discussed in terms of
perspectives for the future.
Citation
ID:
281554
Ref Key:
perlman2023molecular