Pretreatment PET in breast cancer: is there a role?

Excerpt

Breast carcinoma shows greater heterogeneity than the vast majority of adenocarcinomas and carries a highly variable prognosis dependent on a wide range of factors, including tumour size and stage, histological subtype, grade, hormone receptor status and a growing range of molecular abnormalities. Accurate preoperative prognostication is highly important in selecting the most appropriate individualized therapy for a particular patient, and considerable interest is now being focused on noninvasive imaging as a means to achieve this. The ability of ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT to combine functional and anatomical data has contributed enormously to oncology [1], and in particular to the emerging field of personalized medicine [2], but it has not yet found a routine role in the preoperative assessment of breast cancer. We ask here whether this situation is likely to change. …