An increasing number of pulmonary nodules are being referred for investigation by PET/CT, said senior author Dr. Fergus Gleeson of Oxford University Hospitals National Health Service (NHS) Trust.
"There have been a number of publications on textural analysis and its potential in determining tumor behavior, so we thought it might be of value in differentiating benign from malignant disease, and as the data are already available from the CT scan, it is potential free information that seemed to be worth looking at," Gleeson told AuntMinnie.com.
The researchers calculated imaging measures (such as maximum and minimum intensity) and textural features (such as kurtosis or fractal dimension) for 33 patients with histology-proven pulmonary nodules. They found that nodule textural characteristics appear to be useful in differentiating benign from malignant nodules, Gleeson said.
"The data are already available on the scans performed to assess nodules," he said. "It needs to be studied in a bigger population to determine if our findings are consistently reproduced, but if so, then software may be developed to give a read out on textural analysis of nodules and the probability of malignancy."
Presenter Dr. Jean Lee will share more details during the Monday morning talk.
