Trial Information

Whole-body Diffusion MRI for Staging, Response Prediction and Detecting Tumor Recurrence in Patients With Ovarian Cancer

1. Staging --- (PET-)CT is used nowadays to provide imaging information about the disease
burden of ovarian cancer patients and a diagnostic staging laparoscopy under general
anesthesia is often necessary to allow correct and accurate staging. The applicant
propose an "all-in-one" imaging modality providing high quality thoracic-abdominal
images without using ionizing radiation and/or radioactive material. This allows
accurate assessment of operability in a minimally invasive manner.

2. Early treatment assessment --- Although response to the first administration of
chemotherapy is quite reasonable, most patients show tumor recurrence and achieve
increasingly poorer response rates to second- or third-line regimes. Therefore it is
of major concern that a individualized prediction of chemosensitivity can be performed
avoiding unnecessary toxicity from inefficient chemotherapeutic agents. A promising
perspective is that the predictive data to be generated might prove to be sufficiently
powerful to predict chemosensitivity early in the course of the treatment, facilitating
a timely change of treatment in nonresponders. This could avoid unnecessary toxicity
for patients, improving quality of life and moreover implicate considerable savings for
the healthcare sector.

3. Identifying tumor recurrence --- Identifying tumor recurrence at an early stage could
translate into reduction of unnecessary biopsies, cost savings and reduced morbidity
associated with the biopsy procedure. But the most important issue is that early
diagnosis can be life saving with respect to tumor recurrence.