BALTIMORE—Post-treatment PET/CT scans may be necessary for some patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), according to a presentation at the 2015 SNMMI Annual Meeting.
“[T]he role of post-treatment PET/CT has been controversial,” said Mehdi Taghipour, MD, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
“Our study proves that 39% of follow-up PET/CT scans added clinical value, which represents a significant improvement in NHL patient care.”
Dr Taghipour presented the details of this study at the meeting as abstract 599.
He and his colleagues had examined 560 PET/CT scans from 204 patients. Imaging was performed 6 months or more after the patient completed primary therapy.
The researchers assessed the value of follow-up PET/CT by conducting statistical analyses to determine changes in patient management and evaluated the accuracy of these scans compared to either histopathology or an additional 6-month follow-up.
Results showed that the sensitivity of PET/CT for detecting relapsed NHL was 95.1%, and the specificity was 90.5%. Positive and negative predictive values were 84.5% and 97.1%, respectively.
The overall accuracy of follow-up PET/CT with the common imaging agent fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) was 92.1%.
Follow-up PET/CT led to changes in patient management in 17% of cases, and new treatments were initiated after 15.7% of scans. More than 69% of scans were performed without prior clinical suspicion of recurrence, and 30.7% of scans were ordered because of suspected disease.
More than 22% of follow-up scans showed suspected disease when there was no clinical suspicion for disease recurrence, and the presence of disease was ruled out in 17.4% of scans where the treating physician had suspected recurrence prior to the scan.
