Positron emission tomography in the diagnosis of lung cancer

Lung cancer is a common form of cancer. Positron emission tomography (PET) has become an important tool for staging of the disease, for assessment of operability and limitation of radiation volume when surgery is not indicated. The authors have looked over the recent literature on PET and lung cancer in international journals and discuss the main points. They find that for 60 per cent of the patients the planned treatment was modified as the result of a PET examination. Thus, PET is an important tool in the diagnosis of lung cancer all over the industrialized world. But PET is unavailable in Norway, which makes the treatment of lung cancer suboptimal there