Imaging and PET-PET/CT imaging

Abstract

PET-CT has grown because the lack of anatomic landmarks in PET makes "hardware-fusion" to anatomic cross-sectional data extremely useful. Addition of CT to PET improves specificity, but also sensitivity, and adding PET to CT adds sensitivity and specificity in tumor imaging. The synergistic advantage of adding CT is that the attenuation correction needed for PET data can also be derived from the CT data. This makes PET-CT 25-30% faster than PET alone, leading to higher patient throughput and a more comfortable examination for patients typically lasting 20 minutes or less. FDG-PET-CT appears to provide relevant information in the staging and therapy monitoring of many tumors, such as lung carcinoma, colorectal cancer, lymphoma, gynaecological cancers, melanoma and many others, with the notable exception of prostatic cancer. For this cancer, choline derivatives may possibly become useful radiopharmaceuticals. The published literature on the applications of FDG-PET-CT in oncology is still limited but several well-designed studies have demonstrated the benefits of PET-CT.