Impacts of neuroimaging on psycho-oncology

Non-invasive neuroimaging has become important in the field of psycho-oncology. Positron emission tomography (PET) is a highly advanced form of scintigraphy and used for observation of regional tissue activities such as metabolism and perfusion. Nowadays, PET measurement of glucose consumption has been widely used not only for cancer diagnosis but also for evaluation of brain activity in various psychiatric and neurological disorders. Recently, it has been used for evaluation of relatively mild depression among cancer patients. In addition, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used for detection of brain metastasis in cancer patients, but also useful for evaluation of stressful events by measuring the sizes of tiny neural structures such as hippocampus and amygdala. In this report, recent findings of non-invasive neuroimaging in cancer patients are overviewed, putting emphasis on the possible impacts of neuroimaging on psycho-oncology.