Follicular thyroid carcinoma metastasizing to rare sites and exhibiting variable inter-lesional heterogeneity on 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography and 131I.

Abstract

A patient of differentiated follicular thyroid carcinoma with unusual sites of metastases is illustrated with 131I and 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography (18F-FDG PET/CT) imaging findings. The described case harbored extremely rare metastasis to the urinary bladder with multi-organ metastatic disease (including unusual sites of right bronchus and hepatic metastases). There was inter-lesional heterogeneity among the metastatic lesions with regard to the 131I and FDG uptake in the aforementioned lesions. The detection of such heterogeneity has important implications for patient management in metastatic differentiated thyroid carcinoma.