Artificial Intelligence for Response Evaluation With PET/CT

Positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) are nuclear diagnostic imaging modalities that are routinely deployed for cancer staging and monitoring. They hold the advantage of detecting disease related biochemical and physiologic abnormalities in advance of anatomical changes, thus widely used for staging of disease progression, identification of the treatment gross tumor volume, monitoring of disease, as well as prediction of outcomes and personalization of treatment regimens. Among the arsenal of different functional imaging modalities, nuclear imaging has benefited from early adoption of quantitative image analysis starting from simple standard uptake value normalization to more advanced extraction of complex imaging uptake patterns; thanks to application of sophisticated image processing and machine learning algorithms. In this review, we discuss the application of image processing and machine/deep learning techniques to PET/CT imaging with special focus on the oncological radiotherapy domain as a case study and draw examples from our work and others to highlight current status and future potentials.