ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT During the last years, positron emission tomography (PET) has become an essential functional imaging tool in oncology clinical practice worldwide, with growing impact on cancer staging, restaging, therapy response assessment, and follow-up. The high diagnostic accuracy of PET imaging relies on its molecular nature. Using different radiotracers, PET is able to early detect functional and biochemical alterations that occur at the molecular and cellular levels in cancer tissue, such as alterations in metabolism, proliferation, and angiogenesis or peculiar biological features of cancer cells such as specic receptor expression or tumor hypoxia. This unique behavior of PET as molecular imaging is emerging as the basis for a new clinical approach that could integrate the patient-specic and diseasespecic molecular information with selection of personalized therapies or identication of more accurate prognostic groups of patients. A better knowledge of the biological tumor changes at the molecular level is the essential basis for the development of new PET tracers targeting more and more specic cancer biomarkers. It is, doubtless, the future direction for research and it will allow PET to play a more relevant and leading role in the “personalized” management of oncologic patients.
