Abstract
Objectives
To detect hypervascularized liver lesions, early dynamic (ED) 18F-FDG PET may be an alternative when contrast-enhanced (CE) imaging is infeasible. This retrospective pilot analysis compared contrast between such lesions and liver parenchyma, an important objective image quality variable, in ED PET versus CE CT.
Materials and methods
Twenty-eight hypervascularized liver lesions detected by CE CT [21 (75 %) hepatocellular carcinomas; mean (range) diameter 4.9 ± 3.5 (1–14) cm] in 20 patients were scanned with ED PET. Using regions of interest, maximum and mean lesional and parenchymal signals at baseline, arterial and venous phases were calculated for ED PET and CE CT.
Results
Lesional/parenchymal signal ratio was significantly higher (P < 0.005) with ED PET versus CE CT at the arterial phase and similar between the methods at the venous phase.
Conclusion
In liver imaging, ED PET generates greater lesional–parenchymal contrast during the arterial phase than does CE CT; these observations should be formally, prospectively evaluated.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Robert Marlowe for editing the manuscript and Dominik Driesch (Biocontrol Jena GmbH, Jena, Germany) for performing statistical analyses. This research was funded from the regular University Hospital Jena budget.
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Freesmeyer, M., Winkens, T. & Schierz, JH. Contrast between hypervascularized liver lesions and hepatic parenchyma: early dynamic PET versus contrast-enhanced CT. Ann Nucl Med 28, 664–668 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12149-014-0862-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12149-014-0862-5