PET/CT imaging in different types of lung cancer: an overview.

Valentina Ambrosini, Silvia Nicolini, Paola Caroli, Cristina Nanni, Arianna Massaro, Maria Cristina Marzola, Domenico Rubello, Stefano Fanti

Journal: European journal of radiology 2012;81(5):988-1001

PMID: 21458181

Full Text on Elsevier Science View on PubMed

Abstract

Lung cancer (LC) still represents one of the most common tumours in both women and men. PET/CT is a whole-body non-invasive imaging procedure that has been increasingly used for the assessment of LC patients. In particular, PET/CT added value to CT is mainly related to a more accurate staging of nodal and metastatic sites and to the evaluation of the response to therapy. Although the most common PET tracer for LC evaluation is 18F-FDG, new tracers have been proposed for the evaluation of lung neuroendocrine tumours (68Ga-DOTA-peptides, 18F-DOPA) and for the assessment of central nervous system metastasis (11C-methionine). This review focuses on the main clinical applications and accuracy of PET/CT for the detection of non-small cells lung cancer (NSCLC), broncho-alveolar carcinoma (BAC), small cells lung cancer (SCLC), lung neuroendocrine tumours (NET) and solitary pulmonary nodules (SPN).

Address: Department of Nuclear Medicine, Sant' Orsola-Malpighi Hospital, Bologna, Italy.

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejrad.2011.03.020

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MeSH Terms: Female, Humans, Image Enhancement, Lung Neoplasms, Male, Positron-Emission Tomography, Subtraction Technique, Tomography, X-Ray Computed