Application of Metabolic Imaging in Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment

Dear Colleagues,

Molecular Imaging is a technique that visualizes, characterizes, and measures the biological processes at the molecular and cellular levels in living systems. In recent years, there has been a growing interest among basic science researchers and clinicians in imaging tumor metabolism as a viable diagnostic tool in oncology. The resurgence of interests is to understand the molecular and cellular changes that occur in metabolism, how the tumor microenvironment directly affects metabolism, and how metabolic vulnerability affects treatment response in different cancer systems. 

The accelerated aerobic glycolysis has been known to distinguish cancer cells from normal cells for many decades (Warburg Effect), and this distinction has been exploited to detect and image tumors in vivo using FDG-PET (2-fluoro-deoxy-glucose-positron emission tomography). Metabolic changes are emerging as the hallmarks of cancer that can be exploited as imaging biomarkers and employed as reporters for the early detection of cancer and the therapeutic response.

Emerging metabolic imaging techniques will provide the opportunity to visualize the perturbation of metabolism as the cancer initiates, progresses, and responds to therapy.

This Special Issue is set up to encourage colleagues to publish their research studies on the following topics:

•    Altered metabolism in different cancer systems.
•    Imaging tumor metabolism using hyperpolarized magnetic resonance imaging (HP-MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS), deuterium MR Imaging (2H-MRI), and mass spectrometry imaging (MSI).
•    Metabolic imaging biomarkers.

Our goal as Guest Editors of this Special Issue on “Application of Metabolic Imaging in Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment” is to provide the current state-of-the-art imaging tumor metabolism research. We hope an international panel of leading experts in the field will present a series of research articles from basic mechanistic research to translational perspective, to provide our readers a comprehensive view of this rapidly advancing field.

Dr. Prasanta Dutta
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Metabolites is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• metabolism in cancer
• imaging tumor metabolism
• hyperpolarized magnetic resonance imaging
• positron emission tomography
• deuterium metabolic MR imaging
• proton spectroscopy
• mass spectrometry imaging
• NMR metabolomics