The aim of our study was to evaluate the potential benefit of a systematic trunk SPECT/CT associated with a Planar Bone Scan (PBS) in breast cancer (BC) and prostate cancer (PCa) patients at initial staging or recurrence.
In 328 patients, sensitivities and specificities were between 74.4-93% and 78.8-97.5% for PBS and 97.7-100% and 96.8-98.6% for SPECT/CT respectively. PBS was considered equivocal for 67 compared to only 6 patients for trunk SPECT/CT. Regardless of "optimistic" or "pessimistic" analysis of equivocal trunk SPECT/CT lesions, the trunk SPECT/CT was almost perfect, allowing to rely on this result for excluding metastatic disease which was corroborated by ROC curve analysis. The trunk SPECT/CT allowed downstaging for 62 patients (19%) and upstaging for 11 patients.
PBS and a trunk SPECT/CT were systematically performed in all patients. Independent review of PBS and trunk SPECT/CT was performed for each patient and an abnormality interpretative score (Sc) with 3 levels was built: Sc 1: metastatic or probably metastatic pattern, Sc 2: equivocal pattern, Sc 3: benign or probably benign pattern or no abnormality. The bone pattern status was defined by at least 1 year follow-up. The clinical impact was evaluated in terms of down and upstaging in patient analysis.
Trunk SPECT/CT improves the performance of PBS in BC and PCa assessments and results in improvements in both the detection performance of bone metastases as well as a better characterization of equivocal lesions.
Oncotarget. 2018 Aug 03*** epublish ***
Vincent Fleury, Ludovic Ferrer, Mathilde Colombié, Daniéla Rusu, Maëlle Le Thiec, Françoise Kraeber-Bodéré, Loïc Campion, Caroline Rousseau
Nuclear Medicine Unit, ICO Cancer Center, Saint Herblain, France., Nantes-Angers Cancer Research Center, INSERM U892, CNRS UMR 6299, University of Nantes, Nantes, France.