Top 5 Reasons to use PET/CT
In The Initial Clinical Work-up of a New Cancer
- Medicare will now cover PET/CT scans for the initial staging of all patients with solid tumors with the exception of prostate cancer.
- PET/CT offers more accurate TNM staging than conventional imaging which leads to significant changes in patient management.
- PET/CT can identify local extension of a primary tumor into neighboring structures and can also discover adjacent lesions which escaped detection or were equivocal on conventional imaging.
- PET/CT often discovers subcentimeter lymph nodes that were unremarkable on a CT scan due to size. As well, it can rule out disease in enlarged lymph nodes that are benign.
- PET/CT evaluates the whole body with a single scan including the sites where cancer is most likely to spread such as the bone, liver, and lungs and also detects unsuspected synchronous primary tumors.
- PET/CT provides baseline measurements of metabolic activity (SUV) and anatomic size for each individual site of disease against which future studies can be compared.
- PET/CT offers the maxSUV of the primary tumor which has been proven in certain diagnoses to be more predictive of patient prognosis than the TNM stage. This maxSUV should always be quantified before surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
- PET/CT conducted pre-treatment in cancers such as hepatocellular carcinoma and renal cancer with known FDG variability allows baseline quantification of the metabolic activity of the cancer within a particular host.
