LAUSR

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and fatal primary malignant brain neoplasm in adults (1). The current standard of care treatment for GBM comprises maximal safe surgical resection followed by concurrent chemoradiation therapy (CCRT) and maintenance chemotherapy with temozolomide. Despite aggressive multimodal treatment the prognosis has remained poor (2). Recently, novel therapeutic approaches such as immunotherapy (3) and electric field therapy (4) have been introduced. Currently, several clinical trials are in progress to evaluate the safety profile and therapeutic efficacy of these new frontiers in fight against this devastating and life-threatening disease. In the field of neuro-oncology, diagnosis and treatment response evaluation remain highly dependent on neuroimaging methods. While conventional magnetic resonance (MR) imaging sequences provide valuable information about the anatomic details and blood-brain-barrier (BBB) integrity, they lack specificity in characterizing gliomas as these neoplasms are highly heterogeneous both in spatial and temporal dimensions. Continuous developments in metabolic and physiologicMR imaging techniques have provided new insights into understanding underlying tumor biology and tumor microenvironment (5–9). Taken together, these techniques have been utilized to make the correct diagnosis, prognosis, evaluation of treatment response to both established and novel therapeutic regimens, and identification of new molecular targets for fostering the discovery of new treatments. Additionally, an emerging field of “radiomics” has the potential to change the ways in which advanced MR imaging techniques can be utilized more efficiently (10). This Research Topic was launched to collect high-quality manuscripts to advance our knowledge on clinical utilities, existing challenges, and limitations of using metabolic and physiologic MR imaging techniques in characterizing GBMs. A total of twelve manuscripts (nine original research and three review articles) were finally accepted for publication under this Research Topic.