Clinical applications of PET/CT in oncology

Abstract

FDG-PET, and more recently PET/CT, has become an established clinical tool for aiding cancer management. Despite a number of new tracers that have specific clinical and research applications, FDG remains the most commonly used radiopharmaceutical for tumour characterisation, staging, response assessment and surveillance. FDG-PET/CT is now a routine investigation in many common cancers, including lung, lymphoma, oesophageal and colorectal cancers, affecting management decisions at a number of points in the treatment pathway. In addition, FDG-PET/CT, as a downstream marker of drug effect, is now more commonly adopted into clinical trials as an imaging biomarker to determine early therapeutic response to novel cancer therapeutics with the development of quantitative and semiquantitative methods for objective measurements and response categorisation. With continued improvements in scanner design, reconstruction and analysis software, as well as the introduction of hybrid PET/MRI, it is highly likely that FDG-PET will remain an important clinical cancer imaging tool for years to come.