Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel.
Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel.
Int J Mol Sci. 2023 Feb 5;24(4):3151. doi: 10.3390/ijms24043151.
Immunotherapy constitutes a paradigm shift in cancer treatment. Its FDA approval for several indications has yielded improved prognosis for cases where traditional therapy has shown limited efficiency. However, many patients still fail to benefit from this treatment modality, and the exact mechanisms responsible for tumor response are unknown. Noninvasive treatment monitoring is crucial for longitudinal tumor characterization and the early detection of non-responders. While various medical imaging techniques can provide a morphological picture of the lesion and its surrounding tissue, a molecular-oriented imaging approach holds the key to unraveling biological effects that occur much earlier in the immunotherapy timeline. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a highly versatile imaging modality, where the image contrast can be tailored to emphasize a particular biophysical property of interest using advanced engineering of the imaging pipeline. In this review, recent advances in molecular-MRI based cancer immunotherapy monitoring are described. Next, the presentation of the underlying physics, computational, and biological features are complemented by a critical analysis of the results obtained in preclinical and clinical studies. Finally, emerging artificial intelligence (AI)-based strategies to further distill, quantify, and interpret the image-based molecular MRI information are discussed in terms of perspectives for the future.
免疫疗法是癌症治疗的一种范式转变。其在美国食品和药物管理局 (FDA) 的多项批准，为传统疗法疗效有限的病例带来了更好的预后。然而，许多患者仍然无法从这种治疗模式中获益，并且肿瘤反应的确切机制尚不清楚。非侵入性的治疗监测对于肿瘤的纵向特征描述和对无应答者的早期检测至关重要。虽然各种医学成像技术可以提供病变及其周围组织的形态图像，但分子导向的成像方法是揭示免疫治疗时间线上更早发生的生物学效应的关键。磁共振成像 (MRI) 是一种高度通用的成像方式，通过对成像管道进行先进的工程设计，可以针对特定的感兴趣的生物物理特性来调整图像对比度。在这篇综述中，描述了基于分子 MRI 的癌症免疫治疗监测的最新进展。接下来，通过对临床前和临床研究中获得的结果进行批判性分析，对基础物理学、计算和生物学特征进行了介绍。最后，根据未来的展望，讨论了基于人工智能 (AI) 的新兴策略，以进一步提取、量化和解释基于图像的分子 MRI 信息。
