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Distribution of malignant tumors for different body regions
Source publication
Objective:
To compare the diagnostic ability and time efficiency of contrast-enhanced (CE) whole body FDG PET/MRI protocol and non-contrast-enhanced (NCE) protocol.
Subjects and methods:
Ninety-three patients with known primary tumors underwent whole-body hybrid FDG PET/MRI during the follow-up of their malignancies with the use of NCE and CE pr...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... 1) In the abdomen, the CE PET/MRI protocol (median 2, IQR 1 -6) was superior to the NCE protocol (median1, IQR 0-2) (p < 0.001, n = 65) (Fig. 2). A c c e p t e d m a n u s c r i p t There was no difference between the number of malignant tumors detected by the two protocols for the head and neck (p = 0.356, n = 13), bone (p = 0.414, n = 28), thorax (p = 0.09, n = 31) (Fig. 3), and lymph nodes (p = 0.196, n = 32) ( Table 3). ...Citations
The recent advancements in hybrid positron emission tomography–magnetic resonance imaging systems (PET/MRI) have brought massive value in the investigation of disease processes, in the development of novel treatments, in the monitoring of both therapy response and disease progression, and, not least, in the introduction of new multidisciplinary molecular imaging approaches. While offering potential advantages over PET/CT, the hybrid PET/MRI proved to improve both the image quality and lesion detectability. In particular, it showed to be an effective tool for the study of metabolic information about lesions and pathological conditions affecting the brain, from a better tumor characterization to the analysis of metabolic brain networks. Based on the PRISMA guidelines, this work presents a systematic review on PET/MRI in basic research and clinical differential diagnosis on brain oncology and neurodegenerative disorders. The analysis includes literature works and clinical case studies, with a specific focus on the use of PET tracers and MRI contrast agents, which are usually employed to perform hybrid PET/MRI studies of brain tumors. A systematic literature search for original diagnostic studies is performed using PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus and Web of Science. Patients, study, and imaging characteristics were extracted from the selected articles. The analysis included acquired data pooling, heterogeneity testing, sensitivity analyses, used tracers, and reported patient outcomes. Our analysis shows that, while PET/MRI for the brain is a promising diagnostic method for early diagnosis, staging and recurrence in patients with brain diseases, a better definition of the role of tracers and imaging agents in both clinical and preclinical hybrid PET/MRI applications is needed and further efforts should be devoted to the standardization of the contrast imaging protocols, also considering the emerging agents and multimodal probes.
PET/MR imaging is in routine clinical use and is at least as effective as PET/CT for oncologic and neurologic studies with advantages with certain PET radiopharmaceuticals and applications. In addition, whole body PET/MR imaging substantially reduces radiation dosages compared with PET/CT which is particularly relevant to pediatric and young adult population. For cancer imaging, assessment of hepatic, pelvic, and soft-tissue malignancies may benefit from PET/MR imaging. For neurologic imaging, volumetric brain MR imaging can detect regional volume loss relevant to cognitive impairment and epilepsy. In addition, the single-bed position acquisition enables dynamic brain PET imaging without extending the total study length which has the potential to enhance the diagnostic information from PET.
