Treatment And Follow-Up Guidelines For Multiple Brain Metastases: A Systematic Review

TL;DR

This systematic review discusses current treatment and follow-up strategies for multiple brain metastases, emphasizing the role of stereotactic radiosurgery, challenges in disease progression monitoring, and potential of AI-based predictive models.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of treatment options and highlights the emerging role of AI in predicting disease progression post-treatment.

Findings

SRS is increasingly used for multiple brain metastases.

Monitoring disease progression remains challenging.

AI models could improve follow-up and treatment decisions.

Abstract

Brain metastases are a complication of primary cancer, representing the most common type of brain tumor in adults. The management of multiple brain metastases represents a clinical challenge worldwide in finding the optimal treatment for patients considering various individual aspects. Managing multiple metastases with stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) is being increasingly used because of quality of life and neurocognitive preservation, which do not present such good outcomes when dealt with whole brain radiation therapy (WBRT). After treatment, analyzing the progression of the disease still represents a clinical issue, since it is difficult to determine a standard schedule for image acquisition. A solution could be the applying artificial intelligence, namely predictive models to forecast the incidence of new metastases in post-treatment images. Although there aren't many works on this subject, this could potentially bennefit medical professionals in early decision of the best treatment approaches.