Published in:
01-12-2009 | Original Article
Impact of additional SPECT in bone scanning in tumor patients with suspected metastatic bone disease
Published in: Annals of Nuclear Medicine | Issue 10/2009
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Objective
The aim of this study was to investigate the additional value of single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) for patient staging compared to planar bone scanning in an unselected cohort of cancer patients.
Methods
The study included 271 consecutive tumor patients in whom planar imaging and two-bed position SPECT of the spine and the pelvis had been performed. Retrospective image interpretation was performed independently for planar and SPECT scans. Findings were categorized as ‘benign’, ‘equivocal’, or ‘malignant’ on a lesion base, and as ‘no metastatic disease’, ‘equivocal’, or ‘metastatic disease’ on a patient base.
Results
447 lesions were detected by SPECT. Missing of lesions in planar images was rare (4.3% of all SPECT lesions). Planar findings differed from SPECT findings in 149 lesions (33.3%). Most of these ‘inconsistent’ lesions were rated as equivocal in the planar images but benign (14.5% of all lesions) or malignant (11.0%) by SPECT. On a patient base, 81.6% of patients with planar equivocal staging were classified as either benign (55.3%) or malignant (26.3%) by SPECT. Patients definitively staged as ‘no metastatic disease’ or ‘metastatic disease’ in planar images were staged differently by SPECT in only 3.7% of cases (up-staging in 2.6% and down-staging in 1.1%).
Conclusions
Single-photon emission computed tomography changed a definite staging as based on planar images in less than 4% of the patients. In patients with planar equivocal staging, however, SPECT allowed a definite diagnosis in more than 80% of these cases, and, thus, should be performed routinely in patients with equivocal findings.