Effectiveness of the addition of the brain region to the FDG-PET/CT imaging area in patients with suspected or diagnosed lung cancer.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the brain region imaging in FDG-PET/CT scanning of patients with suspected or diagnosed lung cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We performed the study retrospectively on the medical charts of 427 patients. We divided the FDG-PET/CT field of view (FOV) into four major imaging regions brain, head-neck, abdomen and pelvis. Metastatic findings on these regions were checked and determined the potential of these findings to affect the chemotherapy or radiotherapy protocol or surgical management. If metastatic findings had a potential to modify these parameters, we named this situation as "clinical contribution". Considering the number of bed positions of these regions, we calculated the clinical contribution of each region and named as "effective clinical contribution". Then, we calculated the metastatic findings, clinical contribution, and effective clinical contribution ratios. RESULTS: We found different brain metastasis ratios for lung cancer, solitary pulmonary mass (SPM), and solitary pulmonary nodule (SPN) groups (8.7, 2.8 and 0.9 %, respectively). In addition, the clinical contribution and effective clinical contribution ratios in the brain region for these three groups were 6.4, 2.8, 0.0 and 6.4, 2.8, 0.0 %, respectively. The highest metastatic findings (30.6 %) and clinical contribution (9.8 %) ratios were found in the abdomen region of the lung cancer group. However, the highest effective clinical contribution ratio (6.8 %) was found in the brain region within the same group. CONCLUSIONS: The addition of the brain region to the limited whole-body FOV in FDG-PET/CT scanning seems to be effective in the lung cancer and SPM groups, but not in the SPN group.