Positron Emission Tomography: An Advanced Nuclear Medicine Imaging Technique from Research to Clinical Practice

Abstract

This chapter describes the use of positron emission tomography (PET) in clinical practice. PET is an advanced diagnostic imaging technique, which can not only detect and localize, but also quantify physiological and biochemical processes in the body noninvasively. The ability of PET to study various biological processes opens up the new possibilities for both fundamental research and day-to-day clinical use. PET has played an important role for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes in patients with neurological and cardiological infections and inflammations, vasculitis, and other autoimmune diseases. Fluoro-d–glucose (FDG) PET has been used successfully as a noninvasive diagnostic test for solitary pulmonary nodules (SPN) in order to distinguish benign lesions from malignancies. It is found that a whole-body FDG PET scan is as accurate as a panel of imaging modalities currently employed in detecting disease and is significantly more accurate in detecting multifocal disease, lymph node involvement, and distant metastasis. FDG PET is also accepted as a useful and highly sensitive tool for the localization of epileptogenic zones.