Overview of Early Detection, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Head and Neck Cancers

With the emerging fields of precision health, precision medicine, and digital health, head and neck cancer management is undergoing a paradigm shift to become more proactive instead of predominantly reactive. Cancer is a disease that affects everyone either directly or indirectly and, therefore, it is important to develop effective approaches for early detection of cancer. Promising approaches for cancer detection and management are rapidly advancing in areas such as medical imaging, noninvasive continuous health monitoring, leveraging big data, individualized treatment plans, and many other promising areas. However, with great promise also comes challenges including sensitivity and specificity of approaches, implementation into the current health ecosystem, and other efficiency and economic considerations. Cancer management is improving beyond guidelines intended for population-level care and can be tailored specifically for the individual. In this way, the efficacy and treatment outcomes can be greatly improved with treatment plans designed to maximize the benefit to the patient by incorporating personalized data. Moreover, using continuous monitoring, platforms can be developed to better manage patient care, avoid clinical visits when possible, and change treatment plans once a patient is identified as a nonresponder. In this chapter, opportunities and limitations are discussed along with potential future directions.