Tracking Tumor Perfusion in Locally Advanced Breast Cancer

Patients with locally advanced breast cancer (LABC) are treated routinely with chemotherapy before surgery. To define response to such treatment, clinicians generally rely on clinical assessment as well as mammography, ultrasound, or magnetic resonance imaging studies. Another, less frequently used imaging tool, positron emission tomography (PET), has been used to predict response to preoperative therapy. Specifically, investigators have used PET imaging to show that tumors with high pretherapy [¹⁸F]fluorodeoxyglucose metabolic rates (MRFDGs) relative to blood flow (BF) were more likely to be resistant to therapy (J Nucl Med 2002; 43:500). They also reported that resistant tumors were more likely to have higher BF during therapy and that pa…