Exploration of tumor response evaluation criteria in the era of tar-geted therapy / 中国肿瘤临床

ABSTRACT

The era of targeted molecular therapy for cancer has arrived. The mechanisms of targeted molecular drugs are different from those of chemotherapy drugs. The tumor response evaluation criteria that we currently use are the summary of experiences from evaluating the effect of chemotherapy drugs. Despite continuous improvement and standardization of the details, tumor response evalua-tion criteria, from the earliest WHO criteria to the improved RECIST and RECIST 1.1 criteria, are all based on measurement of tumor size, as chemotherapy drugs directly kill tumor cells. The aforementioned criteria are outlined in this review. However, targeted molecu-lar drugs mainly inhibit tumor cell proliferation. The effect of targeted molecular drugs on tumors is different from that of chemothera-py drugs. Thus, tumor response evaluation criteria suitable for targeted molecular drugs have been developed in recent years. This re-view introduces Choi criteria that use CT attenuation coefficient (Hounsfield unit [HU]) to describe tumor density. The criteria have measured indicators that include tumor size and tumor density. This review also introduces the following criteria derived from the Choi criteria for Modified Choi (mChoi) criteria size and attenuation CT (SACT), and morphology, attenuation, size, and structure (MASS).