Abstract
Objective: The aim of this investigation is to determine the impact of hybrid single photon emission computed tomography/computed tomography (SPECT/CT) on the detection of parathyroid adenoma. Materials and methods: 16 patients presented with suspected parathyroid adenoma localised within the neck. All patients were injected with Tc-99m sestamibi and were scanned with a GE Infinia Hawkeye SPECT/CT. There were six negative and ten positive confirmed cases. Five expert radiologists specializing in nuclear medicine were asked to report on the 16 planar and SPECT data sets and were then asked to report on the same randomly ordered data sets with the addition of CT. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was performed using the Dorfman-Berbaum-Metz multireadermulticase methodology and sensitivity and specificity values were generated. A significance level of p ≤ 0.05 was set for all comparisons. Results: ROC analysis demonstrated an AUC of 0.64 and 0.69 for SPECT and SPECT/CT respectively (p = 0.31). Mean sensitivity scores increased from 0.64 to 0.80 (p = 0.17) and specificity scores decreased from 0.57 to 0.40 (p = 0.17) with the addition of the CT data. Conclusion: This preliminary investigation suggests that extra CT information may increase lesion detection as well as false positive rates for SPECT-based investigations of a single parathyroid adenoma. However the difference in diagnostic efficacy between the two groups was not found to be statistically significant therefore requiring further investigation. These findings have implications beyond the clinical situation described here.
Published Version
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