With many in the American medical community joining in the discussion about Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, the Medical Imaging and Technology Allianace (MITA) released a policy statement outlining the role imaging can play in treating cancer and highlighting the importance of imaging’s inclusion in Cancer Moonshot discussions.

“Treating cancer is impossible without medical imaging,” the organization said in its statement. "The same will be true for curing cancer."

They then went on to offer suggestions on how to incorporate imaging technology in the Cancer Moonshot, including calls for new technologies, new ways to apply existing technologies and improvements for systems that analyze imaging data.

This means researching “orphan imaging” uses in the same way orphan drugs are studied, said MITA, in order to find new tracers and tissue characterization. The statement also called for increasing efforts on screening for more kinds of cancer, learning to better differentiate between aggressive and non-aggressive cancers and using imaging to better monitor treatment progress in real time.

Plus, the statement said, radiologists and other physicians must have access to better resources for sharing and analyzing imaging data.

“Over the past several decades, billions of medical images have been acquired and stored on servers all around the world. This is an untapped wealth of knowledge which should be analyzed so as to accelerate our understanding of how cancer can be cured,” the statement read.

Opening pathways for this shared knowledge between departments and between hospitals would be an important step in collaborative analysis, MITA said.

All kinds of imaging (CT scans, MRIs, PET scans, etc.) are integral to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, the statement points out. Seeing an unusual imaging reading can be one of the first signs something is remiss with a cancer patient, so including imaging advances could be an integral part of achieving the Cancer Moonshot’s goal to make 10 years of cancer research progress in five years.