Quantitative imaging to characterize pancreatic and esophagogastric cancer

Patient with pancreatic and esophageal cancer have a dismal prognosis and treatment response varies greatly between them. In the clinical work-up of pancreatic and esophageal cancer patients there is therefore a great demand for non-invasive makers that can stratify patients and predict treatment response. Potentially, such markers could be extracted using non-invasive, quantitative, imaging methods. Such quantitative imaging biomarkers can inform on biological processes involved in the development and treatment of cancer.
The general aim of this thesis is to characterize the tumor microenvironment of pancreatic and esophagogastric cancer by quantitative imaging and to investigate if these methods enable to monitor treatment and predict patient outcome in these cancers. We develop, validate and apply multiple imaging techniques and processing methods on multiple imaging modalities in both a clinical and pre-clinical setting to investigate the potential of imaging biomarkers in the clinical work-up of pancreatic and esophagogastric cancer.
The methods and results described in this thesis demonstrate the potential impact of quantitative imaging biomarkers in clinical practice. However, implementation of such methods in a clinical work-up and routine is still lacking.