Nickoleta L. Hoefling
While much of CTP application in neuroradiology has been in stroke and intracranial tumor imaging, previous interesting studies have shown CTP’s usefulness in head and neck cancer. It has been shown that CTP is not only useful in diagnosing head and neck cancer but also in predicting which tumors may respond better to nonsurgical organ preservation therapy.1 Changes in CTP measures occur during the course of chemoradiation, potentially allowing clinicians to monitor response to treatment.2 Correlation between the histologic measure of microvascular density and CTP has also been demonstrated.3 We wanted to determine if CTP parameters correlated with the serologic and histologic tumor biomarkers of HPV, p16, and EGFR. This could provide further insight into the complex biologic processes at work in head and neck cancer tumors. Additionally, our study could result in an initial framework for the development and promotion of biologic and molecular imaging capabilities of CT, beyond standard anatomic imaging.
Potential clinical applications for this work include allowing clinicians to use CTP to noninvasively characterize tumors according to biologic properties. This could help stratify otherwise similar-appearing tumors, and possibly influence treatment options.
As this was a retrospective preliminary investigation with a small sample size, prospective work is being done on a larger scale, as well as to study other clinically important biomarkers.
Parts of this work were presented at the 45th annual meeting of the American Society for Head and Neck Radiology in San Diego, California, on Sept 7-11, 2011.