Kanou T, Funaki S, Minami M, Ose N, Kimura T, Fukui E, Watabe T, Shintani Y. Usefulness of positron-emission tomography for predicting the World Health Organization grade of thymic epithelial tumors.
Thorac Cancer 2022;
13:1651-1656. [PMID:
35460177 PMCID:
PMC9161332 DOI:
10.1111/1759-7714.14434]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/01/2022] [Revised: 04/04/2022] [Accepted: 04/07/2022] [Indexed: 11/29/2022] Open
Abstract
Background
It is often difficult to distinguish between thymoma and thymic carcinoma by preoperative radiological tests. While there have been some reports that the maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax) in positron emission tomography‐computed tomography (PET‐CT) is useful to this end, no large‐scale analysis has been performed. We therefore analyzed the usefulness of the SUVmax and tumor size (TS) for differentiating thymic epithelial tumors.
Methods
From 2011 to 2019, 129 patients with thymic epithelial tumor who underwent PET‐CT before surgical treatment were enrolled. The relevance of the SUVmax to the World Health Organization (WHO) histological type was assessed. To reduce the impact of the TS, the ratio of the SUVmax to the TS was also investigated.
Results
A total of 99 thymoma cases and 30 thymic carcinoma cases were enrolled into the study. The SUVmax and SUVmax/TS of thymic carcinoma were significantly higher than those of thymoma (SUVmax: 7.7 ± 3.4 vs. 3.3 ± 1.3, p < 0.01; SUVmax/TS: 1.5 ± 0.7 vs. 0.6 ± 0.4, p < 0.01). Focusing on the patients with a moderate SUVmax of ≤5 (84 thymoma and 4 thymic carcinoma), the SUVmax/TS values of thymic carcinoma were still significantly higher than those of thymoma (1.6 ± 0.8 vs. 0.6 ± 0.4, p < 0.01).
Conclusions
PET‐CT might provide significant information for differentiating images of thymoma and thymic carcinoma. We experienced several cases of thymic carcinoma with a moderate SUVmax of ≤5, and SUVmax/TS was considered a useful parameter for differentiating such cases.
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