Dr. Nina Poetsch from the Medical University of Vienna will discuss her team's results. They analyzed pretherapeutic PET/MRI scans, using histology through surgical excision or biopsy as the ground truth. A total of 87 breast cancer patients were matched according to age, tumor size, histologic subtype, and molecular subtype. Out of these, 40 were placed in the FDG group, with 18 positive lymph nodes found. The other 47 were in the FEC group, with 21 positive lymph nodes found.
The team found that the area under the curve (AUC) in the F-18 FDG group was 0.821 for finding metastatic lymph nodes for cortical diameter and 0.844 for visual T2-weighted evaluation. Also for this group, the AUC for the maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax) was 0.852 and 0.801 for visual PET evaluation (p > 0.05).
In the F-18 FEC group, the AUC was 0.791 for cortical diameter, 0.711 for visual T2w evaluation, 0.821 for SUVmax, and 0.847 for visual PET evaluation (p>0.05).
The authors wrote that based on their findings, F-18 FEC could be used similarly to F-18 FDG in lymph node staging with PET/MRI. Find out more in Poetsch's presentation.
