Patients with advanced ovarian cancer have a very high relapse rate following primary treatment, with 60 to 85% of patients relapsing. Treatment planning is an important factor in patient care, but few reliable options exist to help physicians accurately plan treatment and select patients who are appropriate candidates for a specific therapy.
Researchers from the University of Western Ontario and the Lawson Health Research Institute in Canada have recently shown that CT perfusion technology can predict how ovarian cancer patients respond to treatment. Developed by the team, CT perfusion assesses changes in blood flow to the tumor prior to and following treatment, using X-ray dye plus a conventional CT scanner. Although this technique is used worldwide to measure blood flow to the brain following stroke, this is the first time CT perfusion was applied to ovarian cancer patients.
Published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, the multi-center clinical trial demonstrated that blood flow to the tumor increases following treatment in patients who experience a recurrence of symptoms within six months, whereas blood flow decreases in patients who are symptom-free for longer. The major advantage of this technology is that it enables timely evaluation of blood flow (four weeks post-treatment), eliminating the need to wait months before symptoms recur. As such, assessment of treatment efficacy can be made earlier, allowing accurate and timely planning of subsequent treatment, if necessary. It also introduces a unique biomarker for future investigations of novel treatment protocols.
Study in Clinical Cancer Research: CT Perfusion as an Early Biomarker of Treatment Efficacy in Advanced Ovarian Cancer: An ACRIN and GOG Study…
Via: Western University…