Interventional locoregional treatment and metabolic response: advantages of using PET/CT in the evaluation of response to treatment

Interventional oncology locoregional therapies are validated treatment modalities for primary and secondary tumors in liver, lung, kidney and bone. At this time, there is no accordance in the choice of imaging modality to assess treatment response. Morphological imaging and RECIST 1.1 criteria based on size variation are limited by several critical points. On the other hand the role of functional imaging, in particular by [18F]-fluorodeoxyglucose ([18F]-FDG) positron emission tomography (PET), in both staging and response evaluation of locoregional treatments remains unclear because of the heterogeneous nature of available data. The aim of this paper is to summarize the available literature illustrating the state of art of metabolic evaluation of response after locoregional therapies in the three major organs of interest: liver, lung and bone.