Effectiveness of positron emission tomography scan in postoperative long term follow up of patients with nonsmall cell lung cancer

Abstract

AimThere is very few data about the use of positron emission tomography (PET) in the long term follow up of patients operated for lung cancer. We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of PET scan in detecting distant me-tastases in the long term follow up of asymptomatic patients operated for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).MethodsPET scan was per-formed to sixty five asymptomatic patients. The patients who had a positive PET scan for metastasis underwent MRI and/or biopsy to verify metastasis.ResultsMean age of the patients was 58.09 ± 8.64 (44-82) years, and 57 (87.7 %) of them were male. Forty eight (73.8%) of the patients had epider-moid cell, 15 (23.1%) had adeno and 2 (%3.1) had large cell carcinoma. Post-operative stage of 1 (1.5%) patient was 1A, 14 (21.5%) of them were stage 1B, 1 (1.5%) of them was stage 2A, 27 (41.5%) of them were stage 2B and 22 (33.8%) of them were stage 3A. PET scan detected metastasis in 7 (10.8%) patients. In one patient PET scan was proven to be false positive. Sites of metastases in PET scan were lung in 3 (4.5%) patients, vertebra in 3 (4.6%) patients and tibia in 1 (1.5%) patient. In detecting distant metastases accu-racy rate of PET was calculated as 98%, sensitivity was 100%, and specificity was 98%.ConclusionIn asymptomatic patients with NSCLC, PET imaging appears to be useful as an alternative to conventional imaging to rule out unsuspected systemic disease in the postoperative long term follow up.

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