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In order to evaluate neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and derived neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (d-NLR) in predicting response and complications in rectal cancer patients who underwent surgery after neo-adjuvant radio-chemotherapy, 87 patients were evaluated. Cutoffs before and after radio-chemotherapy were respectively 2.8 and 3.8 for NLR, and 1.4 and 2.3 for d-NLR. They were analyzed in relation to clinical and pathological outcomes. Patients with preoperative NLR and d-NLR higher than cutoffs had significantly higher rates of tumor regression grade response (TRG ≥ 4) and postoperative complications. Elevated NLR and d-NLR after radio-chemotherapy are associated with worse pathological and clinical outcome.

The reduced toxicity and the documented low rate of marginal failures make the adaptive approach a modern option for future randomized studies. The best scenario to confirm its application is probably in neoadjuvant chemoradiation trials.

The primary goal of precision medicine is to minimize side effects and optimize efficacy of treatments. Recent advances in medical imaging technology allow the use of more advanced image analysis methods beyond simple measurements of tumor size or radiotracer uptake metrics. The extraction of quantitative features from medical images to characterize tumor pathology or heterogeneity is an interesting process to investigate, in order to provide information that may be useful to guide the therapies and predict survival. This paper discusses the rationale supporting the concept of radiomics and the feasibility of its application to Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer in the field of radiation oncology research. We studied 91 stage III patients treated with concurrent chemoradiation and adaptive approach in case of tumor reduction during treatment. We considered 12 statistics features and 230 textural features extracted from the CT images. In our study, we used an ensemble learning method to classify patients’ data into either the adaptive or non-adaptive group during chemoradiation on the basis of the starting CT simulation. Our data supports the hypothesis that a specific signature can be identified (AUC 0.82). In our experience, a radiomic signature mixing semantic and image-based features has shown promising results for personalized adaptive radiotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer.