Pitfalls in PET/CT imaging

• Published in: Journal of physics. Conference series Vol. 317; no. 1; pp. 012015 - 6
• Main Authors: Rondogianni, Ph, Papathanasiou, N, Giannopoulou, Ch
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol IOP Publishing 23.09.2011
• Subjects: Computed tomography; Computer aided tomography; Differentiation; Fluorine; Monitoring; Physics; Positron emission; Tomography; Uptakes; Utilities
• ISSN: 1742-6596; 1742-6588; 1742-6596
• DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/317/1/012015

PET with 2-[fluorine 18] fluoro-2-deoxy-d-glucose (FDG), has been a clinical tool for the evaluation of various cancers providing valuable metabolic information clinically helpful in the diagnosis, initial staging, therapy monitoring and restaging. However, FDG is not specific for neoplastic processes. Unless anatomic correlation is available to delineate normal structures, pathologic sites of FDG accumulation can easily be confused with normal physiological uptake, leading to false-positive or false-negative findings. Coregistration of PET scans (functional and morphologic information) with computed tomographic (CT) scans (anatomic information) using a combined PET-CT scanner improves the overall sensitivity and specificity of information provided by PET or CT alone. In this paper, we discuss the probable causes of false negative images and pitfalls due to technical reasons, inflammatory processes or benign lesions as well as the utility of PET-CT in differentiating malignant from inflammatory and benign processes, since in some cases such differentiation cannot be made, with certainty, using FDG PET alone.