Molecular Imaging Insight - September 2007 - (Page 17) By MARy C. TIERNE y Clinical Study Digest PET/CT Makes Its Mark on Patient Management Clinical-FDG PET/CT research is focused on diagnosing, characterizing, staging and restaging of cancer as well as on improving the management of cancer patients. This is of particular interest in lung cancer—the leading cause of cancer death in the u.S., with more than 186,000 new cases diagnosed and 167,000 deaths expected in 20061. A variety of studies here show PET/CT’s superiority as a tool to assist in the diagnosis of specific cancers and to identify the best treatment for cancer patients. other areas of PET/CT research include lymphoma, colorectal and liver cancer, as well as fever of unknown origin. The studies demonstrate that PET/CT can improve patient management which should result in more effective treatments thereby avoiding unneces1 CA Cancer J Clin. 2006;56:106-130 sary side-effects of potentially toxic and expensive treatments. lunG CAnCEr Mediastinal nodal Staging of nonsmall Cell lung Cancer using Integrated F-FDG PET/CT in a TuberculosisEndemic Country Ñ Cancer 2007:109:1068-77 Integrated PET/CT is effective in mediastinal nodal staging of nonsmall cell lung cancers (NSCLCs) thanks to its high specificity and accuracy, according to researchers from the Departments of Radiology and Center for Imaging Science, Nuclear Medicine, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Thoracic Surgery at Samsung Medical MolecularImaging.net Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine in Seoul, Korea. Their study that prospectively assessed 674 patients was led by Yoon Kyung Kim, MD. It also was presented at the 2006 RSNA meeting in Chicago. The team noted that the high specificity of PET/CT came at the expense of sensitivity by interpreting calcified nodes or nodes—with high attenuation with CT and high FDG uptake with PET—as benign in a tuberculosisendemic region. While CT has been widely used to evaluate tumor size and adjacent structure invasion preoperatively, studies have shown it’s not as accurate for lymph Molecular Imaging Insight 17 http://MolecularImaging.net
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