1. Staging --- (PET-)CT is used nowadays to provide imaging information about the disease burden of ovarian cancer patients and a diagnostic staging laparoscopy under general anesthesia is often necessary to allow correct and accurate staging. The applicant propose an "all-in-one" imaging modality providing high quality thoracic-abdominal images without using ionizing radiation and/or radioactive material. This allows accurate assessment of operability in a minimally invasive manner.
2. Early treatment assessment --- Although response to the first administration of chemotherapy is quite reasonable, most patients show tumor recurrence and achieve increasingly poorer response rates to second- or third-line regimes. Therefore it is of major concern that a individualized prediction of chemosensitivity can be performed avoiding unnecessary toxicity from inefficient chemotherapeutic agents. A promising perspective is that the predictive data to be generated might prove to be sufficiently powerful to predict chemosensitivity early in the course of the treatment, facilitating a timely change of treatment in nonresponders. This could avoid unnecessary toxicity for patients, improving quality of life and moreover implicate considerable savings for the healthcare sector.
3. Identifying tumor recurrence --- Identifying tumor recurrence at an early stage could translate into reduction of unnecessary biopsies, cost savings and reduced morbidity associated with the biopsy procedure. But the most important issue is that early diagnosis can be life saving with respect to tumor recurrence.
