Published 2003 | Version v1
Journal article

Diagnosis in medullary thyroid cancer with [18F]FDG-PET and improvement using a combined PET/CT scanner

  • 1. Department of Nuclear Medicine, University of Esses (Germany)
  • 2. Department of Radiodiagnostics, University of Essen (DE)

Description

Today, positron emission tomography (PET) investigation using fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) is the most sensitive and specific single modality established for localizing metastases of medullary thyroid cancer (MTC). Even at calcitonin serum levels below 20 pg/ml, tumor localization may be successful in individual cases. However, especially in such early tumor stages, the morphological correlation using PET is unsatisfactory. With the newly available fixed combination of PET and computed tomography (PET/CT), this drawback can be overcome as PET/CT allows a point-by-point correlation of pathological function with morphological structure. Conventional PET alone yielded an approx 80 % sensitivity and specificity in MTC: a result that will be surpassed by the combined PET/CT scanner. (author)

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Acta Medica Austriaca
Journal Volume
30
Journal Page Range
p. 22-25
ISSN
0303-8173