HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Wong, C. O. Articles by Morita, T. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Wong, C. O. Articles by Morita, T.

Clinical Skills in Conducting Research Studies on Clinical Applications of Oncologic PET

William Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, Michigan

TO THE EDITOR:

We read with great interest the article by Hara et al. (1), which was published in the September 2000 issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. Although we agree with the authors that the FDG uptake in metastatic mediastinal lymph node lesions could be less than that of the primary cancer, this does not preclude our accurate detection of these metastatic lesions. The authors wanted to illustrate their points in the article but had forgotten the clinical skills of interpreting clinical PET. If one scales down the intensity in Figures 3 and 4, one can readily see the lesions in the mediastinum by FDG. The only case they presented that is not obvious to us is in Figure 2, which the authors presented with the wrong image of FDG. They used nonattenuated corrected images instead of the corresponding images with attenuation correction, which is known to show higher intensity than that of the former images. The foregoing reasons may explain the low-end sensitivity of detecting mediastinal lymph nodes observed by the authors as reported previously (2). We bring up these issues to stress the importance of clinical skills in conducting research studies on clinical applications of oncologic PET.

REFERENCES

1. Hara T, Inagaki K, Kosaka N, Morita T. Sensitive detection of mediastinal lymph node metastasis of lung cancer with ¹¹C-choline PET. J Nucl Med 2000;41:1507–1513.[Abstract/Free Full Text]
2. Coleman RE. PET in lung cancer. J Nucl Med 1999;40:814–820.[Abstract/Free Full Text]

International Medical Center of Japan, Tokyo, Japan

REPLY:

We read the comments by Wong and Dworkin regarding our article in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine (1). They pointed out that the FDG PET image in Figure 2 must be an emission image that was not properly corrected by the transmission data. We confirmed this fact by reappraising our logbooks and computer files (a transmission scan was not obtained in this particular case) and found no such negligence in other cases. We apologize for overlooking this. In addition, they stated that the skills of clinical interpretation compensate for the difficulty in detecting small tumors with FDG. We agree partially with their opinion but emphasize that the FDG image can be interpreted more easily if it is compared with the ¹¹C-choline image, as we have done on nearly 1,500 patients with tumors.

REFERENCE

1. Hara T, Inagaki K, Kosaka N, Morita T. Sensitive detection of mediastinal lymph node metastasis of lung cancer with ¹¹C-choline PET. J Nucl Med 2000;41:1507–1513.

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Wong, C. O. Articles by Morita, T. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Wong, C. O. Articles by Morita, T.