A new multidisciplinary paper by researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine neurosurgery, radiation oncology, and radiology has been selected for the March 2022 cover of the journal Radiology: Imaging Cancer. The paper reports on significant findings that promise improved post-operative care for patients who have undergone brain surgery for a meningioma.
Meningiomas, which are the most common type of brain tumor, are typically treated with surgery. After surgery, however, patients who have aggressive tumors (or whose tumors recur) are often referred for post-operative targeted radiation therapy. Planning that therapy requires precise imaging using MRI, but those scans have had limitations. Scarring from the surgery can interfere with the accuracy of the image, and tumors that involve bone can also produce imprecise imaging after surgery. Developing a protocol that improves post-operative imaging, and thus the precision of the radiation therapy, holds the potential for more effective treatment.
In this paper, titled “Dynamic 68Ga-DOTATATE PET/MRI in the Diagnosis and Management of Intracranial Meningiomas,” the authors describe a novel approach to post-operative imaging in patients with meningiomas. Building on previous work from this group and others, researchers introduced a dynamic PET acquisition protocol, performed simultaneously with MRI, that allowed precise delineation of tumor tissue. Researchers combined dynamic analysis of the PET data with high-resolution MR data to quantify a wider range of clinically relevant tumor features and assist in differentiating tumor from background activity. The work provides further support for incorporating DOTATATE PET/MRI as a standard tool in post-operative evaluation in patients with meningioma, enabling more precise radiotherapy targeting and thereby potentially improving clinical outcomes.
The study was led by Drs. Jana Ivanidze and Nicolas Karakatsanis, as first and senior authors respectively, from Radiology. The paper was co-authored by Drs. Michelle Roytman, Myrto Skafida, Joseph Osborne, Sadek Nehmeh, and Eaton Lin from Radiology; Drs. Susan Pannullo, Rohan Ramakrishna, and Theodore Schwartz from Neurological Surgery; Dr. Jonathan Knisely from Radiation Oncology; as well as Weill Cornell Medicine student Sean Kim and WCM alumna Dr. Shannon Glynn.