PhD dissertation: Multimodality treatment and response assessment in esophageal cancer

Summary

Although the prognosis of patients with esophageal cancer has improved over the past decades, treatment still has a detrimental impact on a patients’ quality of life. The treatment of locally advanced esophageal cancer is increasingly shifting towards individualized strategies that are based on developments within the fields of neoadjuvant therapy and surgery. The aim of this thesis was to establish evidence to guide individualized decision-making for esophageal cancer patients by assessing the impact and efficacy of neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy, improving treatment response assessment by means of a multimodality approach using 18F-FDG PET-CT and DW-MRI, and refining surgical treatment by performing a more appropriate risk-stratification of patients for surgery following neoadjuvant therapy.