PET-CT in the diagnosis of both primary breast cancer and axillary lymph node metastasis: initial experience

Breast Cancer Staging in a Single Session: Whole-Body PET/CT Mammography

“…Wang et al (37) reported a sensitivity of 80%, a specificity of 90%, and an accuracy of 87% in 15 patients with breast cancer. Yang et al found a sensitivity of 88% for the detection of axillary lymph node metastases in patients with inflammatory breast cancer (38).…”

Comparison of the Diagnostic Value of FDG-PET/CT and Axillary Ultrasound for the Detection of Lymph Node Metastases in Breast Cancer Patients

“…The addition of morphologic CT data to metabolic [ 18 F]-fluoro-deoxyglucose (FDG) PET data to combined anato-metabolic imaging increased the diagnostic accuracy over CT and PET alone (18). Recently, whole-body FDG-PET/CT is also increasingly used for breast cancer staging and treatment monitoring, revealing its diagnostic potential by detecting previously unknown metastases (19–23). However, there is little evidence concerning the diagnostic accuracy for axillary lymph node staging (10).…”

PET/CT in oncology: for which tumours is it the reference standard?

“…Another study involving 165 patients reported a sensitivity of 28% and specificity of 86% [ 78 ] . To date, only one small study (15 patients) has been reported using PET/CT for axillary nodal staging which demonstrated a sensitivity of 80%, specificity of 90% and accuracy of 87% [ 129 ] . There is no published paper on PET/CT in assessing prognosis but earlier work using FDG-PET suggested that relapse-free survival was directly related to the SUV [ 130 ] .…”