Current status of nuclear medicine clinical application of FDG-PET for cancer diagnosis: Lung cancer

Recent advances in small cyclotrons, PET scanners, and image-processing software have made it possible to apply FDG-PET for clinical use, especially for tumor imaging. Although the efficacy of FDG-PET for several tumors remains a problem under discussion, the efficacy of PET for lung cancer has been studied in great detail and has already been established. The roles of FDG-PET for lung cancer management are, roughly speaking, 1) characterization of pulmonary nodules, 2) staging of lung cancer, 3) monitoring therapeutic effect, and 4) early diagnosis of tumor recurrence. We examined the usefulness of FDG-PET for lung cancer by analyzing our own data and reviewing recent reports. Two image-processing techniques, the image fusion technique and the respiratory-gated data-acquisition method, are also introduced in this article. FDG-PET is a promising method of anatomical imaging that is complementary to such techniques as CT and MRI. It may obtain a more important position among imaging modalities in the future.