WCCS/EADO 2016 | Treatment response assessment in melanoma and the challenge of pseudoprogression with immunotherapy

Marius Erik Mayerhöfer, MD, PhD of the Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria gives an overview of his talk on treatment response assessment in melanoma held at the 2016 World Congress on Cancers of the Skin (WCCS) and the Congress of the European Association of Dermato-Oncology (EADO) in Vienna, Austria. According to Dr Mayerhöfer, treatment response assessment is one of the main challenges for imaging; the traditional approach is to use lesion size as the main criterion but new methods can not only assess the size of the lesion but also the metabolism. He talks about FDG-PET as an example, which tracks the glucose metabolism and how it changes during therapy. In regard to novel treatments, he further discusses how immunotherapy often leads to a pseudoprogression, which is one of the main reasons why metabolic and functional imaging will be important.