Pr. Pierre VERA
Fonction : Professeur des Universités - Praticien Hospitalier
Groupe : Quantif
Email :
Biographie
Professor Pierre Vera is a nuclear medicine physician and full professor at the University of Rouen, with over 30 years of expertise in functional imaging, PET imaging optimization for external radiotherapy, and translational research. He is currently Director General of the Henri Becquerel Cancer Center (one of the 18 cancer center in France from Unicancer network) and leads the AIMS research team (Integrated Multimodal Health Analysis), focused on leveraging imaging, biological, and clinical data for precision medicine.
His scientific contributions center on the integration of [¹⁸F]FDG PET in radiation oncology, particularly in non-small cell lung cancer. He coordinated several major clinical trials, including the multicenter randomized RTEP7 study (Lancet Oncology, 2024) and its companion prognostic imaging analysis (Journal of Nuclear Medicine, 2025). These studies demonstrated the role of interim PET in guiding adaptive dose escalation, improving outcomes in locally advanced cancers.
Professor Vera has also contributed to the development of PET imaging of tumor hypoxia, angiogenesis, and theranostic tracers. His team was among the first in Europe to compare hypoxia-specific tracers and to evaluate angiogenesis imaging with RGD tracers in lymphoma. His translational research includes radiopharmaceutical development and image analysis in collaboration with physicists and engineers (AIMS - QuantIF group).
He has co-authored European practice guidelines for PET in radiotherapy (EANM/SNMMI/ESTRO) and has secured multiple competitive grants, including two national PHRCs (RTEP5, RTEP7), regional funding for PET/MRI and digital PET, European grant for PET segmentation analysis, and a €14.6M REACT-EU program. His publication includes over 250 peer-reviewed articles (61 since 2020), with an h-index of 52. He is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences, having delivered plenary lectures at leading meetings such as EANM, ESTRO, the Royal College of Medicine…
Over the past four years, he has supervised multiple PhD and MD theses and continues to invest in education, contributing of teaching annually across undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education levels. He also organizes national training in functional imaging for radiotherapy. Hospital activities include regular PET imaging sessions, internal vectorized radiotherapy and tumor board.
Publications associées
- Quantitative MRI to Characterize Hypoxic Tumors in Comparison to FMISO PET/CT for Radiotherapy in Oropharynx Cancers.
Cancers (Basel) · 2023 - Respiratory muscle metabolic activity on PET/CT correlates with obstructive ventilatory defect severity and prognosis in patients undergoing lung cancer surgery.
Respirology · 2023 - Synergic prognostic value of 3D CT scan subcutaneous fat and muscle masses for immunotherapy-treated cancer.
J Immunother Cancer · 2023 - Dosimetry for targeted radionuclide therapy in routine clinical practice : experts advice vs clinical evidence.
Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging · 2023 - ESTIMation of the ABiLity of prophylactic central compartment neck dissection to modify outcomes in low-risk differentiated thyroid cancer: a prospective randomized trial.
Trials. · 2023 - Advances in PET and MRI imaging of tumor hypoxia.
Front Med (Lausanne). · 2023 - Evaluation of the capability and reproducibility of RECIST 1.1. measurements by technologists in breast cancer follow-up: a pilot study.
Sci Rep. · 2023 - Body Composition to Define Prognosis of Cancers Treated by Anti-Angiogenic Drugs.
Diagnostics (Basel) · 2023 - Thyroidectomy without Radioiodine in Patients with Low-Risk Thyroid Cancer.
N Engl J Med · 2022 - Joint EANM/SNMMI/ESTRO practice recommendations for the use of 2-[18F]FDG PET/CT external beam radiation treatment planning in lung cancer V1.0.
Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging · 2022 - Perspective paper about the joint EANM/SNMMI/ESTRO practice recommendations for the use of 2-[18F]FDG-PET/CT external beam radiation treatment planning in lung cancer.
Radiother Oncol · 2022 - Deep learning analysis of contrast-enhanced spectral mammography to determine histoprognostic factors of malignant breast tumours.
Eur Radiol · 2022 - Multi-task multi-scale learning for outcome prediction in 3D PET images.
Comput Biol Med · 2022 - A Tri-attention Fusion Guided Multi-modal Segmentation Network Pattern Recognition
Elsevier, Pattern Recognition · 2022 - Missing Data Imputation via Conditional Generator and Correlation Learning for Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation
Pattern Recognition Letters · 2022 - Synthetic MRI for Radiotherapy Planning for Brain and Prostate Cancers: Phantom Validation and Patient Evaluation.
Front Oncol · 2022 - Using 18F-FDG-PET/CT Metrics to Predict Survival in Ra-Dio-Iodine Refractory Thyroid Cancers.
Diagnostics (Basel) · 2022 - Prognostic value of total tumour volume, adding necrosis to metabolic tumour volume, in advanced or metastatic non-small cell lung cancer treated with first-line pembrolizumab.
Ann Nucl Med · 2022 - Characterization of positioning uncertainties in PET-CT-MR trimodality solutions for radiotherapy.
J Appl Clin Med Phys · 2022 - Weakly Supervised Tumor Detection in PET Using Class Response for Treatment Outcome Prediction.
J Imaging · 2022 - Respiratory gated multistatic PET reconstructions to delineate radiotherapy target volume in patients with mobile lung tumors.
Q J Nucl Med Mol Imaging · 2022 - [What dose escalation in the treatment of locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer?].
Cancer Radiother · 2022 - UMI-Varcal: A Low-Frequency Variant Caller for UMI-Tagged Paired-End Sequencing Data.
Methods Mol Biol · 2022 - First Comparison between [18f]-FMISO and [18f]-Faza for Preoperative Pet Imaging of Hypoxia in Lung Cancer.
First Comparison between [18f]-FMISO and [18f]-Faza for Preoperative Pet Imaging of Hypoxia in Lung Cancer. · 2021 - 1Delayed care for patients with newly diagnosed cancer due to COVID-19 and estimated impact on cancer mortality in France.
ESMO Open · 2021 - Targeting the Urotensin II/UT G Protein-Coupled Receptor to Counteract Angiogenesis and Mesenchymal Hypoxia/Necrosis in Glioblastoma.
Front Cell Dev Biol · 2021 - Panniculitis in a Woman With Opportunistic Pulmonary Coinfection by Pneumocystis jirovecii and Cryptococcus neoformans: 18F-FDG PET/CT Revealing the Infection and Assessing Treatment Response.
Clin Nucl Med · 2021 - Latent Correlation Representation Learning for Brain Tumor Segmentation With Missing MRI Modalities.
IEEE Trans Image Process · 2021 - Nucleus Basalis of Meynert Stimulation for Lewy Body Dementia: A Phase I Randomized Clinical Trial.
Neurology · 2021 - Reproductibility of baseline tumor metabolic volujme measurements in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Is there a superior method ?
Metabolites · 2021 - Evaluation of an Automatic Classification Algorithm Using Convolutional Neural Networks in Oncological Positron Emission Tomography.
Front Med (Lausanne) · 2021 - Trimodality PET/CT/MRI and Radiotherapy: A Mini-Review.
Front Oncol · 2021 - Prognostic value of low skeletal muscle mass in patient treated by exclusive curative radiochemotherapy for a NSCLC.
Sci Rep · 2021 - Angiogenesis imaging study using interim [18F] RGD-K5 PET/CT in patients with lymphoma undergoing chemotherapy: preliminary evidence.
EJNMMI Res · 2021 - Reproducibility of Baseline Tumour Metabolic Volume Measurements in Diffuse Large B-Cell LymphomA: Is There a Superior Method?
Metabolites · 2021 - Feature-enhanced Generation and Multi-modality Fusion based Deep Neural Network for Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing MR Modalities.
Neurocomputing · 2021 - Prognostic value of baseline metabolic tumour volume in advanced-stage Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Sci Rep · 2021 - SUVmax-based assessment of PET response shows a superior specificity to Deauville criteria for predicting recurrence in Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Leuk Lymphoma · 2021 - Correlation between FDG hotsports on pre-radiotherapy PET/CT and areas of HNSCC local relapse : impact of treatment position and images registration method.
Front Med (Lausanne) · 2020 - UMI-VarCal : a new UMI-based variant caller that efficiently impoves low-frequency variant detection in paired-end sequencing NGS Libraries.
Bioinformatics · 2020 - Uptake of pineal gland visible on 18F-DOPA PET/CT with last generation of SiPM PET/CT.
Clin Nucl Med · 2020 - Correlations between baseline 18F-FDG PET tumour parameters and circulating DNA in diffuse large B cell lymphoma and Hodgkin lymphoma.
EJNMMI Res · 2020 - Impact of the Bayesian penalized likelihood algorithm (Q.Clear®) in comparison with the OSEM reconstruction on low contrast PET hypoxic images.
EJNMMI Phys · 2020 - Comparison of hypermetabolic and hypoxic volumes delineated on [18F] FDG an [18F] Fluoromisonidazole PET/CT in non-smal-cell lung cancer patients.
Mol Imaging Biol · 2020 - Development of 111-In-Labelled DOTA urotensin II analogues for targeting the UT receptor overexpressed in solid tumours.
Biomolecules · 2020 - How to work together between nuclear medicine and radiotherapy departments ?
Cancer Radiother · 2020 - Positron-emission tomography-guided radiation therapy : ongoing projects and future hopes.
Cancer Radiother · 2020 - Correlation between fluorodeoxyglucose hotspots on preradiotherapy PET/CT and areas of cancer local relapse : systematic review of literature.
Cancer Radiother · 2020 - Benefits of positron emission tomography scans for the evaluation of radiotherapy.
Benefits of positron emission tomography scans for the evaluation of radiotherapy. · 2020 - Prognostic value of sarcopenia in patients treated by Radiochemotherapy for locally advanced oesophageal cancer.
Radiat Oncol · 2020 - Impact of positron emission tomography with computed tomography for image-guided radiotherapy.
Cancer Radiother · 2020 - Radiotherapy boost in patients with hypoxic lesions identified by F-FMISO PET/CT in non small cell lung carcinoma : can we expect a better survival outcome without toxicity ? (RTEP5 study).
EJNMMI · 2019 - Radiomics: Principles and radiotherapy applications.
Crit Rev Oncol Hemat · 2019 - Sub-cutaneous fat mass measured on multislice computed tomography of pretreatment PET/CT is a prognostic factor of stageIV non-small cell lung cancer treated by nivolumab.
Oncoimmunology · 2019 - Joint tumor segmentation in PET-CT images using co-clustering and fusion based on belief functions.
IEEE Trans Image Process · 2019 - Comparison of hypermetabolic and hypoxic volumes delineated on 18FDG an 18Fmisonidazole PET-CT in non-small cell lung cancer patients.
Mol Imaging Biol · 2019 - Définition of target volume : when et how can the radiation oncologist use PET ?
Cancer Radiother · 2019 - Detection and segmentation of lymphomas in 3D PET images via clustering with entropy-based optimization strategy.
Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg. · 2019 - Adaptive kernelized evidential clustering for automatic 3D tumor segmentation in FDG-PET images.
Multimedia Systems · 2019 - Comparison of therapeutic evaluation cirteria in FDG-PET/CT in patients with diffuse large-cell-B-cell lymphoma : prognostic impact of tumor/liver ratio.
PLoS One · 2019 - Dual time point 18F-FLT-PET for differentiating proliferating tissues vs non-proliferating tissues.
EJNMMI Res · 2019 - Anthropometer 3D : automatic multi-slice segmentation software for the measurement of anthropometric parameters from CT of PET/CT.
J Digit Imaging · 2019 - Prognostic value of post-induction chemotherapy 18F-FDG PET-CT in stage II/III non-small cell lung cancer before(chemo-)radiation.
PLoS One · 2019
2019- Définition of target volume: when et how can the radiation oncologist use PET?
Cancer Radiother;23(6-7) :745-752. · 2019