Studying local tumour heterogeneity on MRI and FDG-PET/CT to predict response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy in rectal cancer

To investigate whether quantifying local tumour heterogeneity has added benefit compared to global tumour features to predict response to chemoradiotherapy using pre-treatment multiparametric PET and MRI data.Sixty-one locally advanced rectal cancer patients treated with chemoradiotherapy and staged at baseline with MRI and FDG-PET/CT were retrospectively analyzed. Whole-tumour volumes were segmented on the MRI and PET/CT scans from which global...