Clinical investigations on the use of positron emission tomography (PET) for target volume definition in radiation therapy planning

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the clinical value of positron emission tomography (PET) for target volume definition in different tumor entities using different tracers and taking pretreatment of patients into account. The study collective comprised 109 patients with 112 target volumes. In 48 patients with skull base meningiomas (SBM) and 42 patients with meningiomas of other localizations (SOM) undergoing fractionated stereotactic radiation therapy the gross tumor volumes (SBM, n=48; SOM, n=39) based on magnetic resonance imaging/computed tomography (MRI/CT) and ⁶⁸Ga-DOTATOC-PET were compared retrospectively. Additionally, in 19 patients with liver metastasis from colorectal cancer (LM-CRC) treated in 25 CT guided brachytherapy sessions the clinical target volumes (CTV) either based on MRI/CT or ¹⁸F-FDG-PET were compared retrospectively. The spatial agreement of the target volumes was analyzed using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC). The association of DSC, tumor entity and pretreatment was analyzed using the general linear model (GLM). Metric parameters are given as median (25th/75th-quartile). In the complete patient sample the PET based target volume was 24.1 (10.8/51.2) ml and, thus, significantly (p<0.001) increased by 18.9% (-3.6%/62.7%) compared to the MRI/CT based target volume of 20.8 (8.6/45.0) ml. In the subgroup of LM-CRC, the PET based target volume was significantly increased by 24.4% (0%/ 71.4%; p=0.021), and in patients with SBM it was increased by 23.9%(-1.7%/65.7%; p=0.003) whereas in SOM the difference of 8.0% (-3.6%/51.7%; p=0.199) was not significant. The DSC for PET and MRI/CT based target volumes was 0.66 (0.46/0.76) in the whole study group and varied between 0.65 (0.46/0.71) in patients with SBM and 0.70 (0.40/0.79) in patients with SOM. In pre-treated patients with LM-CRC a significant lower DSC of 0.62 (0.41/0.66) was observed in comparison to 0.84 (0.70/0.96) in untreated patients (significant interaction in GLM, p<0.001). In contrast, in patients with SBM and SOM no significant effect of pretreatment was observed. LM-CRC-patients with incomplete dose coverage of the PET-CTVs (<95%) showed a significant higher local 9-month-progression rate (9/15 vs. 1/3; p<0.05) by retrospective analysis. The target volumes either based on PET or MRI/CT showed clinically relevant differences with respect to size and overlap (DSC<0.7) for all the analyzed tumor entities. The association of target volume agreement and pretreatment varied between different tumor entities (significant interactions). As incomplete dose coverage of PET-CTVs in colorectal liver metastasis was indicative of early onset of local progression, the use of PET in target volume definition may be associated with improved local tumor control as well as improved patient survival. Prospective studies with sufficiently high patient numbers are required to verify this hypothesis.