Inter-Organ PET

The human body is a complex system acting on multiple interactions of numerous organs to ensure the organism’s proper functioning (homeostatsis). Diseases may occur when such homeostatic balance supported by inter-organ communication is interrupted. Positron emission tomography (PET) is a widely available imaging method that can be used to examine the metabolic function of the human body non-invasively and quantitatively. We can use PET imaging to examine the entire human body to see how organs “talk” with each other in healthy people and in patients with severe illnesses, such as breast cancer. Our hypothesis is that the exploration of the whole body may allow a better characterisation of the health status of these patients. We believe that metabolic pathways that are characteristic for cancer or tumour progression can be extracted from whole-body PET images. In this very research project, we want to investigate how organs interact in patients with early and advanced breast cancer. We hope to generate cues about the prognosis and course of the disease in these patients. To do so, we first acquire PET image data of healthy subjects to reference inter-organ communications in the absence of severe disease. Then, we examine patients with breast cancer to understand if the organs interact differently in these patients. Tracking the communication and interaction of multiple organs remains a challenging task, which requires the development of new methodologies and analytical tools. Therefore, scientists from different research fields (medicine, PET, artificial intelligence) have joined to advance our toolbox to explore the crosstalk between organs. If our new approach proves successful, we will be able to show the interaction between different organs in breast cancer patients for the first time. We hope to assist clinicians in identifying the appropriate treatment from an increasing repertoire of therapeutics for an improved management of patients beat breast cancer