1 in 8 men will have prostate cancer in their lives. Molecular imaging may offer huge benefits in all stages of the diagnostic work-up, and PET imaging using the tracer prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA) has shown promising results.

This WP aims to establish nation-wide protocols for PSMA-PET (in combination with hybrid MRI or CT) to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy for staging of high-risk prostate cancer and detection of recurrent disease. Furthermore, we will evaluate the benefit of longitudinal PSMA-PET to evaluate treatment response in castration resistant metastatic disease.

All studies will be performed with strict inclusion criteria in a prospective, multi-center design, where patients will be recruited and imaged at all partner hospitals.

Finally, this WP will pilot the feasibility of PSMA PET/MRI to guide focal treatment with state of the art interventions, such as proton beam therapy and PSMA based radionuclide therapy.

Principal Investigators:

• Tone Frost Bathen, Professor, NTNU
• Torgrim Tandstad, Associate Professor, NTNU and Senior Consultant Oncology, St. Olavs

Members of WP1: Prostate Cancer Consortium

• Full list of Members of WP1 Prostate Cancer Consortium

MRI is used in clinical routine for diagnosing brain tumors, but has limitations in identifying tumor grade, true tumor extension and differentiating viable tumor tissue from treatment induced changes and recurrences.

Many brain tumors express increased levels of amino acid transport, which can be imaged with a PET scanner using amino acid radiotracers. Using both MRI and PET will likely improve brain tumor diagnostics, resection, tissue sampling, treatment planning and therapy response assessment significantly.

In this study, combined PET/MRI and three of the most promising amino acid tracers (¹¹C-MET, ¹⁸F-FET and ¹⁸F-FACBC) will be evaluated, with the aim to improve diagnostic accuracy in cerebral gliomas and brain metastases, at primary diagnosis and follow-up.

Principal Investigators:

• Live Eikenes, Professor, NTNU
• Anna Karlberg, Physicist, St. Olavs Hospital

Cognitive and memory problems can be a sign of dementia, but can for instance also be part of a depression or due to a brain tumor. Alzheimer´s disease, the cause of most dementia cases, is associated with abnormal precipitations in the brain which interferes with brain function and leads to neuronal death. These precipitations can only be visualized using different types of PET scanning of the brain. PET scanning of the brain in patients with cognitive or memory complaints could therefore provide both an accurate cause of the memory problems and information on the severity of the Alzheimer´s disease changes. Although MRI scans of the brain cannot diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, it can provide very important information on brain health not captured with PET scanning such as type and distribution of macro- and microvascular disease in the brain, amount of tissue loss, presence of tumors etc. By combining PET-MRI scanning of the brain it is possible to uncover important complementary information on brain health.

In this project we will use different PET methods and comprehensive MRI scanning of the brain to evaluate which of these different methods or combination of these methods, that best predicts future cognitive outcome and separates Alzheimer’s disease from other causes of cognitive and memory problems.

Principal investigators:

• Asta Håberg, Professor, NTNU
• Geir Bråthen, Head of Clinic of Neurology, St. Olavs Hospital
• Katja Scheffler, Associate Professor, NTNU

In WP4 we will establish the clinical workflow for PET- and MRI-based radiotherapy. We will acquire PET and MR images prior to and during radiotherapy and develop new concepts for image-based biologically adaptive radiotherapy, both based on state-of-the-art photon-based radiotherapy and also proton therapy, which soon will be available for cancer patients in Norway.

Our aim is to contribute towards further developments of personalised high-precision radiotherapy resulting in improved outcome, reduced side-effects and better quality of life for cancer patients.

Principal investigators:

• Kathrine Røe Redalen, Professor, NTNU
• Mirjam D. Kaminka Alsaker, Senior Consultant Oncology, St. Olavs Hospital

In the machine learning work package, we aim to develop and validate new methods that exploit the quantitative nature of the PET and MR images. We will develop a pipeline for pre-processing and quality assurance of the acquired images, as well as a toolbox with machine learning algorithms focusing on region classification and detection of change over time. These methods will be applied to answer open clinical questions in cancer and dementia.

Principal investigators:

• Pål Erik Goa, Professor, NTNU
• Mattijs Elschott, Associate Professor, NTNU