ABSTRACT
FDG-PET has played a significant role in the clinical management of lung cancer since it can efficiently visualize the functional metabolic changes of normal and pathological tissues in human body. It has been used more and more widely in many aspects of lung cancer management including diagnosis, staging, target volume delineation for radiotherapy plan, treatment response inspection, and recurrence detection. However, the false positive led by benign and inflammation somehow decreases its diagnostic specificity of lung cancer. The diagnostic methods for lung cancer consist of visual interpretation and semi-quantitative analysis based on static imaging and quantitative analysis based on dynamic imaging. This article briefly reviews the current trends, challenges and foreground of this imaging modality in the field of clinical management of lung cancer.
ABSTRACT
Objective To evaluate the factors affecting the measurement of lung tumor activity concentration (AC) with FDG-PET. Methods High count Monte-Carlo simulations,based on VIP-Man (marked VHP atlas) added with spherical lung tumors of different diameter and activity,were performed to generate the essentially noiseless projection data for PET. The factors related with the measurement of tumor AC were evaluated. Results Using the maximum value in the tumor region of interest (ROI) generally resulted in the over-estimation of AC,and the degree of over-estimation would also increase as the noise became severer. For the small tumors with low AC,the proper partial volume correction was needed. Drawing ROI after post-reconstruction filtering could improve the reproducibility of AC measurement compared with no filtering first. Conclusion The accuracy and reliability of AC measurement depends strongly on factors including tumor size,post-reconstruction filter,noise level,ROI definition,PVE correction,etc.