Relationship between <sup>18</sup>F-FDG PET SUV with Partial Volume Correction and Histology in Gastric and Gastro-Oesophageal Cancer

In vivo molecular imaging techniques is increasingly used in the management of oncological patients, allowing different aspects of oncological pathologies to be assessed (e.g. metabolism, hypoxia) non invasively. The possibility to extract indexes of disease from in vivo biomedical images and to associate them with their biological drivers opens new pro-spective on the role of in vivo molecular imaging and expedites the translation of novel biomarkers from the bench to the clinical environment. In this work we investigate the relationship between 18F-FDG uptake measured by Body- Weight Standardized Uptake Value (SUVBW) as index of cell glucose metabolism, and histological indices for gastric and gastro-oesophageal cancer. For this purpose, Partial Volume Effect Correction (PVC) has been properly compen- sated prior to the measurement of the PET index (PVC-SUVsub>BW). The correlation of 18F-FDG PVC-SUVBW with histol- ogy data was evaluated by bivariate and multivariate statistical analysis. Although obtained in a limited number of pa- tients, our results suggest that correlations can be found when PVC is applied to SUVBW and that 18F-FDG PET can provide information on biological characteristics of gastric and gastro-oesophageal cancer lesions.