Advancing Therapy Planning and Treatment Response Assessment in Neuro-Oncology: From Morphological Imaging to Integrated Biomarkers

Neuro-oncology faces persistent challenges in accurately defining tumor extent and assessing treatment response across primary and secondary brain tumors. In diffuse atrocytomas, infiltrative growth limits the precision of conventional imaging, constraining both surgical resection and radiotherapy planning. Similarly, in brain metastases, standard imaging techniques often lack specificity in distinguishing viable tumor from treatment-related changes. In meningiomas, increasing recognition of molecular subtypes is reshaping classification and therapeutic strategies, but their integration with imaging remains limited. Recent advances in multimodal imaging, including advanced MRI techniques and PET with novel radiotracers, but also new molecular markers have improved the ability to characterize tumor biology in vivo. These developments, together with image-guided surgical and radiotherapy approaches, provide new opportunities to enhance treatment planning, refine response assessment, and support more personalized management in neuro-oncology.This Research Topic focuses on three key objectives in neuro-oncology. First, to advance extended resection strategies in diffuse astrocytoma through improved delineation of tumor extent using advanced MRI and PET, enabling more effective imaging-guided surgery and radiotherapy planning. Second, to evaluate tumor-specific PET tracers and nuclear medicine approaches to improve treatment and disease monitoring. Third, to integrate imaging with molecular diagnosis to support treatment stratification and personalized therapeutic decision-making.This Topic aims to bring together multidisciplinary research advancing both the optimization of treatmentstrategies and the evaluation of treatment response in brain tumors, with a particular emphasis onemerging imaging techniques and their integration with clinical, molecular, and computationalapproaches.We welcome contributions exploring:• Advanced neuroimaging techniques in neuro-oncology, including but not limited to perfusion MRI,diffusion imaging, MR spectroscopy, APT-CEST, and nuclear medicine approaches such as aminoacid PET (e.g., FET, MET, FDOPA), FDG PET, and hybrid PET/MRI, as well as multimodal imagingstrategies• Imaging biomarkers for distinguishing progression, pseudo progression, and treatment-relatedeffects• Imaging-guided treatment planning, including surgical targeting, extent-of-resection strategies,and radiotherapy planning or adaptation• Integration of imaging with molecular, histopathological, and liquid biopsy markers• Radiomics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning applications in response assessment andtreatment decision-making• Novel response criteria and quantitative frameworks• Longitudinal monitoring and prediction of treatment outcomes• Clinical translation and validation of emerging techniques• Applications across primary and secondary brain tumors, including glioblastoma, metastases,meningiomas and lymphoma.Both technical developments and clinically oriented studies in neuro-oncology are encouraged, as well asinterdisciplinary work bridging neuroimaging, oncology, neurology, neurosurgery, radiation oncology, anddata science.Please note that manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics or computational analysis of public omics databases that are not supplemented by relevant functional validation (clinical cohort or biological validation in vitro or in vivo) are out of scope for this Research Topic. Topic editors: Ramona Alexandra Todea, Esther Warnert, Nicolin Hainc Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80039/advancing-therapy-planning-and-treatment-response-assessment-in-neuro-oncology-from-morphological-imaging-to-integrated-biomarkers