Abstract
The clinical diagnosis of cancer emerges from the recognition of specific signs and symptoms, is corroborated by laboratory and imaging tests, and is eventually confirmed by pathology examination. While a comprehensive panel of laboratory tests may provide useful information in the diagnostic work-up of cancer patients, tumor markers should not be routinely investigated for diagnostic purposes, but their use should be confined to surveillance. CT and MRI scans represent the main radiologic techniques used for both anatomic diagnosis and staging of cancer, while 18F-FDG PET/CT allows the evaluation of the metabolic activity of tumor lesions. Innovative radiotracers including 11C-choline and 68Ga-DOTA compounds have been recently developed and show high specificity for detecting prostate cancer and neuroendocrine tumors, respectively. Novel biomarkers such as circulating tumor cells or circulating tumor DNA are on the horizon, and their clinical implementation is steadily undergoing. For the foreseeable future, the integration of next-generation sequencing technologies and high-resolution imaging modalities carries the promise of achieving earlier cancer diagnosis in the precision medicine era, as well as more accurate tumor staging and personalized tumor follow-up.
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Acknowledgment
This work was funded by a grant (# IG11647) from AIRC (Italian Association for Cancer Research). Authors are grateful to Davide Quaresmini, M.D., for making the figures and tables.
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Cives, M., Tucci, M., Silvestris, F. (2021). Diagnosis and Staging. In: Russo, A., Peeters, M., Incorvaia, L., Rolfo, C. (eds) Practical Medical Oncology Textbook. UNIPA Springer Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56051-5_7
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