The research progress of multimodal imaging in malignant lymphoma

Medical imaging plays an important role in the clinical staging, restaging, and therapy assessment of tumors and may also serve as prognostic biomarker. Multimodal hybrid imaging technologies, such as PET/CT and recently PET/MR, have been rapidly developed in recent years. PET/CT is often recommended for the initial staging of FDG-avid lymphomas and therapy monitoring. The role of FDG PET/CT for interim therapy evaluation must be determined. Some feasibility studies indicated that using PET/MR for initial lymphoma staging is feasible. FDG PET/MR seemed to offer a comparable diagnostic performance compared with PET/CT. In this article, the research status and progress concerning multimodal hybrid imaging technologies, such as PET/CT and PET/MR, in malignant lymphoma are reviewed.