Integrated Diagnostics and Theranostics of Thyroid Diseases

This open access book provides basic concepts on Integrated Diagnostics and Theranostics with special emphasis and practical examples of Integrated Diagnostics and Theranostics applications to different human thyroid diseases. Thyroid diseases, including cancers, are increasingly detected but are frequently irrelevant for the clinical point of view (i.e. incidentalomas). Accordingly, it is urgent to move from the simple disease detection to a timely and reliable disease characterization in order to rapidly and safely reassure patients and physician in the majority of cases and concentrate efforts on patients in need of tailored and sometime complex disease management. Moreover, radioiodine treatment was the first theranostic application and is still a pivotal treatment of hyperthyroidism, non-toxic nodular goiter and differentiated thyroid cancer. Nowadays, diagnostic data integration is increasingly used to refine radioiodine indications, predict treatment effectiveness and tailor therapeutic strategies on single patients’ characteristics. The current scenario of in vitro and in vivo diagnostics can be summarized using the “silo metaphor”, where laboratory medicine, pathology and imaging are three conceptually separated diagnostic disciplines, which will increasingly share many comparable features. The substantial progresses in understanding biochemical-biological interplays that characterize human diseases, coupled with extraordinary technical advances, are now generating important multidisciplinary convergences, leading the way to a new frontier, called integrated diagnostics (i.e. convergence of imaging, pathology and laboratory tests with advanced information technology). A better integration of different diagnostic information by expert systems and neural networks will support multidisciplinary integrated diagnostic algorithms and reports. Furthermore, the integration of different molecular and imaging biomarkers will aid clinicians to properly select treatments and stratify patients’ prognosis over time. Featuring also clinical cases discussions to illustrate and debate strengths and pitfalls of potential of Integrated Diagnostics and Theranostics in this setting, the Atlas will be an invaluable tool for clinicians, laboratory specialists, imaging physicians and biomedical technologists in their daily practice.