Ultrasound (US) is the morphological imaging modality of choice for the study of thyroid nodules.
Similarly, the overall volume of the organellar network of both mitochondria and ER is unaffected by the loss of AFG3L2, as demonstrated by quantitative morphological imaging of the mitochondrial and ER networks by transfecting cells with mt-RFP or ER-GFP, respectively.
Therefore, T-staging primarily relies on the information delivered by high-resolution morphological imaging.
For a long time, biochemical markers results were compared to those obtained by conventional morphological imaging modalities.
This technology is nowadays able to detect early cancer lesions undetectable by conventional morphological imaging investigation and most likely responsible for increasing of serum tumor markers levels.
Nevertheless, thanks to the introduction in clinical practice of molecular imaging exams able to identify cancer lesions previously undetectable by conventional morphological imaging instruments, tumor markers are now reevaluated as an early warning able to highlight patients at risk to relapse [ 3].
During the last years, a growing number of scientific studies (Table 2) proved that whole-body FDG-PETCT scan is able to reduce the number of false negative cases by evidencing early tumor lesions previously undetectable by conventional morphological imaging exams.
In particular, according to recent studies (Table 2), both organizations reevaluated the role of tumor markers as an early warning able to highlight those patients at risk to have a recurrence due to clusters of tumor cells undetectable by conventional morphological imaging modalities.
This limits the traditional morphological imaging techniques, which emphasize the quantification simply of structural information.
Whilst therapeutic responses were observed in only a small number of patients with small tumour burdens and after repeated courses of pretargeted RIT, long-term disease stabilization in a large number of the MTC patients (53%) was documented by morphological imaging (computed tomography, MRI) and serial calcitonin and CEA measurements.
