Role of 18F-Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography in Preoperative Assessment of Cytologically Indeterminate Thyroid Nodules

Abstract

(18)F-FDG PET provides high sensitivity to malignant lesions and may be a potentially useful tool in the evaluation of thyroid nodules with indeterminate cytological findings. For these nodules the number of unnecessary thyroidectomies in a hypothetical algorithm using (18)F-FDG PET would be reduced by 39%.

Incidental 18F-FDG uptake in the thyroid in patients diagnosed with PET/CT for other malignancies

“…Occasionally, some of the malignant lesions found in thyroid with the means of PET/CT appear to be metastatic [30]. These data are confirmed in our study population of oncological patients: only one focus of an extrathyroid origin was detected -it was a metastasis of non-small cell lung carcinoma.…”

The role of 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography in differentiated thyroid cancer before surgery

“…Although Sebastianes et al (2007) reported that nodule diameter was not related to SUV, Kim et al (2007) found a significant correlation between SUV and maximum nodule diameter. Sensitivity and specificity were increased for nodules larger than 1 cm (Traugott et al 2010).…”

“…Seven previous studies have evaluated the usefulness of FDG PET for the differentiation of indeterminate nodules of the thyroid, yielding conflicting results (Kresnik et al 2003, de Geus-Oei et al 2006, Kim et al 2007, Sebastianes et al 2007, Hales et al 2008, Traugott et al 2010, Deandreis et al 2012. The sensitivity of FDG PET was 57-100%, depending on the characteristics of the patient population.…”

“…The sensitivity of FDG PET was 57-100%, depending on the characteristics of the patient population. (Kresnik et al 2003, Kim et al 2007, Sebastianes et al 2007, and 27 with AUS or FNs (Deandreis et al 2012). Ten patients who refused surgery (Kim et al 2007), four with ND specimens (Kresnik et al 2003, de Geus-Oei et al 2006, and six with malignancies were excluded from the analysis (Kresnik et al 2003).…”

The Role of 18F-Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography in Thyroid Neoplasms

“…Convectional USG, CT, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have previously been shown to be of some value, but FDG-PET has yet to be assessed in a large prospective study [25]. Table 3 shows a comparison of series examining the utility of FDG-PET in detecting malignancy in a thyroid nodule with indeterminate FNAC findings [25,29,[37][38][39][40][41]. Study size was in the range of 15-51 patients and the criterion for FDG-PET positivity varied among studies.…”