Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
25.6
Conclusions and future perspectives
We analyze the potential and limitations of magnetic resonance spectroscopy and
spectroscopic imaging particularly for the brain and prostate cancer diagnostics
with special relevance to radiation therapy. There is an increasing awareness in
clinical oncology that these two non-invasive modalities could revolutionize not
only tumor diagnostics, but also image-guided surgery, post-operative followup and
surveillance screening. These assessments of experts are based on the extracted
information on a handful metabolites or their concentration ratios. Such information
is not accessible directly from encoded time signals, but rather it becomes available
through mathematical reconstructions via quantifiable data analysis. As presently
illustrated, far more information about the metabolic content of cancerous versus
surrounding normal tissue could be obtained by reliance upon the unequivocal Pade-
based high-resolution quantitative signal processing instead as of the qualitative
Fourier estimation accompanied with ambiguous fitting. This information as the
added value is also vital for target definition and dose planning. Moreover, richer
metabolic information could provide better distinction between recurrent tumor and
non-malignant changes due to radiation therapy. Advances in signal processing
based on the fundamental theory and concepts of quantum-mechanical spectral
analysis will be invaluable for further progress in this field whose data analysis
and interpretation needs to go beyond the already exhausted phenomenological
approaches.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Cancerfonden, the King Gustav the 5th Jubilee
Fund, the Karolinska Institute Fund and by the Signe and Olof Wallenius Stiftelse, to which the
authors are grateful.
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