Aaron Zima
Traditional radiology has focused on the anatomic description of disease before and after therapy. While this is vital to the overall care of patients, as health care moves forward, there will be more and more emphasis placed upon cost containment and patient outcomes for administered therapies. Predicting whether a certain disease process will respond to a particular therapy will become increasingly important. Applications within radiology such as CT and MR perfusion, MR spectroscopy, molecular imaging, and nuclear medicine are exciting tools that provide a more comprehensive understanding of the biology of certain disease processes and how they respond to therapy. As we use these tools to better understand these disease processes, the data obtained will ultimately allow us to better predict response to those therapies and these will become tools that will help guide clinicians in the care of their patients. It is this concept that ultimately led me to my research with CTP to predict response of induction chemotherapy in advanced squamous cell carcinoma of the aerodigestive tract. In this research we found that tumors with elevated blood volume and blood flow were statistically associated with response to induction chemotherapy. Ultimately, this method could be used as a means of selecting patients to undergo chemotherapy instead of surgery, therefore reducing the cost and morbidity for these patients. As more of this type of functional imaging research is performed, radiologists will have an increasing role in the care of patients.