PET Assessment of Immune Effects from Interventional Oncology Procedures

: Interventional oncology treatments have profound effects on tumor immunity. Quantitative molecular imaging with FDG-PET has the potential to aid in understanding baseline tumor characteristics that can predict response to interventional oncology treatments and immunotherapy. This review highlights some of the evidence for immune activation in the setting of locoregional therapies, and the patterns of treatment response that may be expected in the setting of immune induction. Also presented is an argument for measuring global disease metabolic activity over conventional methods of PET quantitation to circumvent challenges in correlating conventional methods of PET quantification to overall disease activity.