To select the right treatment at the right time for your patient is a common slogan used to describe personalised medicine (PM): a new vision of healthcare which is already becoming a reality today. Different “omics” approaches such as genomics, proteomics or metabolomics allow patients’ predispositions to certain diseases or treatment response to specific medication to be predicted.

What is the role of radiology and radiologists in PM?
In the recent white paper, published by the ESR Working Group on Personalised Medicine (Insights Imaging (2015) 6:141–155), the authors emphasise the key roles medical imaging plays in PM. The authors clearly specify all areas and give examples of the unique and personalised information provided with medical imaging technologies.

In a substantial number of diseases, the first step leading from clinical symptoms to a diagnosis relies on imaging. Imaging has played this role for decades: assessing the location and extent of a disease in individual patients and characterising structural abnormalities and physiological environment, thus providing crucial information for the choice of the right treatment.
Read more…