New perspectives in treatment decision for integrated management of rectal cancer: multimodal research for multimodal treatments

Rectal cancer management improved results in the last thirty-five applying new integrated treatment options. Preoperative radiochemotherapy or radiotherapy alone joined to the modern surgery gaining significant improvement of outcomes. Nevertheless, a definitive conclusion about superiority of one on the other in term of survival and toxicity is still lacking, and further improvement is in general required and seems obtainable. The need for a wide sharing of the accumulated knowledge is represented by the consensus conferences that over the years summarizes the state of the art for the management of rectal cancer. One of the most promising opportunities comes from the attempt of characterization of the tumor heterogeneity. An always-increasing number of new parameters come from different sources including genomic, imaging, pathological features and many others. The need of new informatics technologies able to handle and continuously incorporate new inputs derived from the evidences is also imperative. The combined use of large shared databases and "learning models" could allow generating and rapidly testing new hypotheses, providing further survival improvement in the next years.