Is there a role for FDG-PET?

In the last few years, imaging techniques such as FDG-PET have come to play an important role in the daily clinical practice for diagnosis, staging and follow-up of patients. Due to a lack of generally accepted standard guidelines, results from different clinical trials are difficult to compare and the role of PET-CT in a set of standard response criteria remains unclear.

To investigate this further, the FDG-PET RECIST subcommittee constructed a large data set of recent FDG-PET test-retest repeatability studies. Analyses of this dataset aim to show if the repeatability of FDG-PET measurements is robust to variations in image acquisition protocols and whether thresholds can be above which increases or decreases in FDG-PET parameter values are likely attributable to actual changes in tumor metabolism as opposed to random fluctuation. This will hopefully provide insight into how response criteria involving FDG-PET measurements may be updated.