Tumor Diffusion & Metabolism in Head & Neck Cancer: Pretreatment Multimodality Imaging with DW-MRI & 18F-FDG PET

Jacobus F. A. Jansen¹, Heiko Schoder², Yonggang Lu², Hilda E. Stambuk², Dara Srisaranard², Nancy Y. Lee², Snehal G. Patel², Jatin P. Shah², Jason A. Koutcher², Amita Shukla-Dave²

The study aims to correlate pretreatment multimodality imaging (MMI) data obtained with DW-MRI and 18F-FDG PET in patients with advanced head and neck cancer for more precise assessment of the tumor biology. Thirty-six patients with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and 6 with lymphoepithelioma (LE) cancer were included. For all patients, tumor volume, mean(ADC), std(ADC), mean(SUV), max(SUV), and TLG, were correlated. Additionally, secondary normalized measures rADCmin and rSUVmax were correlated. It was found that in head and neck cancer, DW-MRI and 18F-FDG seem to provide independent information on tumor microenvironment for both SCC and LE. However, information regarding the heterogeneous nature of tumors, obtained using the two techniques, seems to be complementary.