Abstract
Positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT), which combines the advantages of high sensitivity and specificity of PET and high resolution of CT, is a unique tool for cancer management. PET/CT has been widely used in cancer diagnosis and treatment. The article reviews the recent applications of PET/CT in radiation oncology, with a focus on 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-PET/CT, addressing the applications in treatment planning and treatment response assessment of radiation therapy.
Highlights
With high sensitivity and specificity, positron emission tomography (PET) is playing an important role in cancer imaging and treatment (Histed et al, 2012; Sveistrup et al, 2012)
PET/computed tomography (CT) has been successfully used in the diagnosis, initial staging, and response assessment in various malignant tumors with high diagnostic accuracy (Borst et al, 2005; Eschmann et al, 2006; Facey et al, 2007) and has been used for PET-guided radiation treatment planning (Jarritt et al, 2006; Gregoire et al, 2007). 18Ffluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) is the only Medicare approved PET/CT tracer for cancer imaging and FDG-PET/CT is the most widely available PET/CT procedure used in daily oncology practice
This study is to review the recent applications of PET/CT in radiation oncology, i.e., in radiation treatment response assessment and treatment planning, with a focus on FDG-PET/CT
Summary
With high sensitivity and specificity, positron emission tomography (PET) is playing an important role in cancer imaging and treatment (Histed et al, 2012; Sveistrup et al, 2012). PET/CT showed high sensitivity and specificity for mediastinal lymph node involvement over CT. PET/CT has showed high sensitivity and specificity in initial staging and restaging cervical cancer and PET/CT has the advantage of detecting gross para-aortic and pelvic lymph nodes (PLNs) for treatment planning, which CT may not be able to detect. Radiation treatment can be improved by using PET/CT for target volume delineation: doses to the tumor can be increased and organs at risk (OARs) can be spared. Positron emission tomography/CT images are used in two ways in radiation treatment planning: for PET/CT images acquired from a diagnostic scanner, the images are registered/fused with planning CT images; for PET/CT images acquired on a dedicated planning PET/CT scanner, the images are directly used www.frontiersin.org
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