Preliminary clinical assessment of dynamic ¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography for evaluating lymph node metastasis in patients with lung cancer: a prospective study

We assessed the diagnostic capacity of dynamic fluorine-18-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography (¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT) and dual-time-point (DTP) PET/CT to explore the optimal scan timing for nodal staging in lung cancer.

Thirty-four patients with lung cancer underwent dynamic and consecutive DTP PET/CT scans. Two readers visually evaluated FDG uptake within each lymph node (LN) and pulmonary artery (metastatic LN: n = 10; nonmetastatic LN: n = 121). For each dynamic and DTP scan, we compared the maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax) and the retention index of the SUVmax (RI-SUVmax) between metastatic and nonmetastatic LNs. We compared the diagnostic capacity of the dynamic and DTP scans using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses.

In the visual analyses of LN metastases, a sensitivity of 20.0–60.0% and specificity of 97.5–100.0% were identified for the first to third dynamic scans. The sensitivity of the 1-h early and 2-h delayed scans was 80.0% and 90.0%, respectively, whereas the specificity was 66.9% and 47.9%, respectively. The visual analysis of the dynamic second phase had the highest accuracy. Semiquantitative analyses revealed that the SUVmax was significantly higher for metastatic LNs than for nonmetastatic LNs in the dynamic second and third phases and the 1-h early and 2-h delayed phases (p < 0.05 for all). The RI-SUVmax was higher in metastatic LNs than in nonmetastatic LNs for the dynamic scan (p = 0.004) and the DTP scan (p = 0.002). The ROC analyses showed that SUV2 and SUV3 had higher performances with high specificity, high negative predictive value, and high accuracy than the other parameters. The area under the ROC curve of the RI-SUV-dual-time-point had the highest value (0.794) without any significant differences between the area under the ROC curves for all parameters (p > 0.05 for all).

Based on the visual and semiquantitative analyses, ¹⁸F-FDG dynamic PET/CT exhibited excellent performance with extremely high specificity in the dynamic second phase.