Staging of untreated nasopharyngeal carcinoma with PET/CT: comparison with conventional imaging work-up

Plasma Epstein‐Barr virus DNA screening followed by 18F‐fluoro‐2‐deoxy‐D‐glucose positron emission tomography in detecting posttreatment failures of nasopharyngeal carcinoma

“…Conventional workups, including physical examinations, endoscopy, computerized tomography (CT) scans, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), chest radiography, whole-body bone scans, and abdominal sonography, have limited sensitivity and specificity in the early diagnosis of recurrent NPC. Recently, functional imaging with 18 F-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose ( 18 F-FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) scans or PET/CT scans has demonstrated encouraging efficacy in NPC staging, [1][2][3][4][5][6] response evaluation, [7][8][9] and relapse detection. [10][11][12][13] Another important advance in NPC is the quantification of plasma EBV DNA with real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (rt-qPCR), which reportedly is a useful tool for the detection, monitoring, and prognostic prediction in NPC.…”

Imaging of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

“…Imaging options include bone scintigraphy, chest x-ray, CT of the thorax, abdomen and pelvis, and PET/CT. Studies have shown fluorodeoxyglucose PET/CT imaging to have a higher sensitivity and specificity in detecting distant metastases [11,22,24,25,[46][47][48][49][50].…”

Clinical application value and progress of PET/CT in nasopharyngeal carcinoma

“…Chen et al [10] had compared one of them were confirmed negative by follow-up. Lin et al [15] analyzed 68 cases of NPC patients with lymph node metastases and found that 39 out of 138 positive lymph nodes whose diameters were <1 cm and identified by 18 analyzed by Zhang et al [21] showed that the sensitivity, specificity hyperplastic, large area lymph nodes of necrosis and node in diameter less than spatial resolution limitation of PET [17,[22][23]] .…”

“…The stage of 24 NPC patients was adjusted after PET/CT scan, among which the stage of 12 patients was adjusted higher and that of 12 patients was adjusted lower, with a total adjustment rate of 35.3%, when he analyzed sixty-eight NPC patients. Ng et al [17] found that PET/CT correctly modified M staging in eight patients (7.2%) and disclosed a second primary lung malignancy in one patient (0.9%) among the 111 NPC patients. Chua et al [21] thought 18 F-FDG PET/CT was superior to PET alone, CT of the thorax and abdomen, skeletal scintigraphy and conventional imaging examination comprising chest X-ray, abdomen ultrasound and bone scanning.…”