Molecular Imaging Insight - May 2008 - (Page 6) ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: Read more on NOPR by J O N at h a N b at C h e l O r SPECIAL REPORT ‘‘T Diagnostic findings from FDG-PET imaging changed the intended care of more than one in three cancer patients, according to a study of first-year data from the National Oncologic PET Registry (NOPR), published this month in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. NOPR was launched in May 2006 in response to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Coverage with Evidence policy to collect data through a clinical registry to inform the Center’s FDG-PET coverage determination decisions for currently non-covered cancer indications. The registry is comprehensive, including data from 23,000 patients. NOPR Delivers Evidence he NOPR working group sought to measure the impact of PET findings on patient management in a manner minimally intrusive to care providers,” said Bruce E. Hillner, MD, lead author for the study and professor and eminent university scholar in the department of internal medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va. “This was critical for successfully collecting the large amount of data required for a robust analysis.” Hillner, currently chair of one of the guideline panels within the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), is also chair of the NOPR working group. NOPR is sponsored by the Academy of Molecular Imaging (AMI) and managed by the American College of Radiology (ACR) and the ACR Imaging Network (ACRIN); ASCO and SNM also have played key roles in guiding the project’s development. NOPR is a prospective data registry that collects information from a PET facility, from the physician requesting a PET scan, and from the interpreting physician’s PET report for cancers not currently covered by CMS. The registry was designed to meet CMS criteria for evidence development; therefore, all patients are Medicare beneficiaries. PET studies performed on Medicare beneficiaries for CMS-approved indications in breast, cervical, colorectal, esophageal, head and neck, non-small-cell lung, and thyroid cancers, or lymphoma or melanoma are not eligible. Cancer types that Medicare currently reimburses for only through NOPR include those of the ovary, uterus, prostate, pancreas, stomach, kidney and bladder. The NOPR web site, www. cancerpetregistry.org, has a complete list of the covered cancer types for the registry. The study analyzed data regarding nearly 23,000 patients contributed to NOPR by more than 1,200 facilities in the United States that provide PET scans. The mean patient age of the patients was 72.6 years; 9.7 percent were younger than 65 years and 5.2 percent were 85 years or older. Ovarian and abdominal cancers are two of the cancer types for which Medicare currently reimburses only through the National Oncologic PET Registry (NOPR). At left is an ovarian carcinoma in a PET with contrast CT angiography (Biograph 16 PET•CT; courtesy of the University of Tennessee Medical Center, Knoxville). Image at right shows a malignant lymphoma in the abdomen (Biograph 16 PET•CT; courtesy of Beijing Hospital, Beijing, China). The primary end-point of the study was the impact of PET on physicians’ intended management. The study authors assessed a change in management in four ways: 1. Intended management was stratified as either treatment or non-treatment. 2. The intent of planned therapies was determined to be either curative or palliative, which allowed the researchers to assess if a meaningful change included a change in intent, even if the specific therapy did not change. 3. Changes in the type or number of clinical actions were defined as minor or major; a major change was defined as a switch in treatment type and a minor change was defined as the addition or deletion of treatments, but where one type remained constant in the pre- and post-PET plan. 4. The data also was scored as to whether therapy intensity increased, decreased, or was unchanged by comparing the number of modes in the pre- and post-PET plans. Analysis of data collected found that FDG-PET utilization is associated with a 36.5 percent change in the decision of whether MolecularImaging.net 6 Molecular Imaging Insight | May 2008 http://www.cancerpetregistry.org http://MolecularImaging.net
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