Radionuclide Tc-99m MDP Imaging for diagnosis of bone tumour at Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital (Ghana): an illustrative review

Radioisotopes are used in diagnosing primary and metastatic bone tumours because of the high sensitivity. Diagnosing bone tumours using technetium methylene diphosphonate (Tc-99m MDP) on 9 randomly selected whole-body bone scans have been demonstrated by clinical studies of patients for illustrative review. Upon satisfactory testing of the e.cam (R) Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography at the Nuclear Medicine Department (Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital), scans of patients provided essential physiologic information about the sites of bone lesions and prognosis as shown by sequential changes in tracer uptake. The bone scintigrams were classified either as normal or pathologic. Of the 197 patients (91 males and 106 females) who underwent radioactive whole-body scans in the year 2006, the peak age at bone tumour detection was between 51 and 60 years. From qualitative analyses of the reported cases, 144 patients were diagnosed with bone tumours, but ∼ 17 % were found to be primary, while ∼ 83 % were metastatic in nature. The observation confirmed other published data that bone tumours with origin in the cells of bone are not prevalent compared to tumours that metastasize from other parts of the body, such as breast, cervix and prostate. Breast, prostate and cervical cancers contributed respectively to 34 %, 19 % and 18 % of the bone tumour cases, but only 3 % were diagnosed with osteoporosis (a relatively rare type of bone disease). (au)