The Quantitative Imaging Network in Precision Medicine

Precision medicine is a healthcare model that seeks to incorporate a wealth of patient information to identify and classify disease progression and to provide tailored therapeutic solutions for individual patients. Interventions are based on knowledge of molecular and mechanistic causes, pathogenesis and pathology of disease. Individual characteristics of the patients are then used to select appropriate healthcare options. Imaging is playing an increasingly important role in identifying relevant characteristics that help to stratify patients for different interventions. However, lack of standards, limitations in image-processing interoperability, and errors in data collection can limit the applicability of imaging in clinical decision support. Quantitative imaging is the attempt to extract reliable, numerical information from images to eliminate qualitative judgments and errors for providing accurate measures of tumor response to therapy or for predicting future response. This issue of Tomography reports quantitative imaging developments made by several members of the National Cancer Institute Quantitative Imaging Network, a program dedicated to the promotion of quantitative imaging methods for clinical decision support.