Thursday, December 4 | 2:10 a.m.-2:20 a.m. | R6-SSNMMI08-5 | S405
In this session late in the meeting, a free web-based tool will be discussed that can help stage Hodgkin lymphoma using PET/MRI scans in children. The task is crucial for selecting appropriate therapies.
Presenter Iryna Vasyliv, MD, a postdoctoral student at Stanford University in Stanford, CA, and colleagues collected PET/MRI scans of 56 pediatric patients and divided them into two groups with matched Ann Arbor stages. One radiology resident, four radiologists, and two nuclear medicine physicians with different levels of experience then staged the patients via traditional inspection (group 1) or with a newly developed web-based staging tool (group 2). The time to generate the Ann Arbor score was compared between groups.
The least experienced reader, a radiology resident, saved 6.05 minutes per case by using the tool, while the most experienced nuclear medicine physician experienced a slight increase in reading time (-0.54 minutes), according to the findings. Overall, the tool resulted in a mean time savings of 3.1 ± 0.9 minutes per case. Importantly, the time saved showed a significant inverse correlation with reader experience (r = -0.866, p = 0.012), indicating that the tool was particularly beneficial for less experienced readers.
“By streamlining the staging process, this tool supports faster clinical decision-making, improves workflow efficiency, and may help reduce variability in PET interpretation across experience levels,” Vasyliv and colleagues noted.
They added that they have made the tool available as a freely accessible web resource -- check out this session to learn more.
