Scans to measure lung tumors can be unreliable

It might potentially lead patients and doctors to believe the cancer is growing when it is not.The study revealed that the patient and the doctor both need to understand that small changes do not necessarily indicate that problem is aggregating. CT scans have already become the gold standard for measuring cancer growth and treatment response. Changes of up to 10 percent can happen simply as a result of the inherent variability of CT imaging. The researchers gave the images to three radiologists who had no idea the scans had been repeated before the tumors could have grown or shrunk appreciably.Findings will help drug developers, who look at increasingly small changes in tumor size during drug tests, forgetting that the scans might be unreliable at that scale. Scientists can build better models of cancer progression that might save both time and money in clinical trials.