Original articleGeneral thoracicUsefulness of Fluorine-18 Fluorodeoxyglucose-Positron Emission Tomography in Management Strategy for Thymic Epithelial Tumors
Section snippets
Patients and Methods
The Kanazawa University Committee for Medical Ethics approved this retrospective study. Individual consent was obtained from the patients to use their resected specimen for research.
Results
There were 16 men and 23 women, with a mean age of 55 years (range, 26 to 81 years). The mean maximum diameter of thymic tumor was 61.5 mm (range, 20 to 137 mm). The number of patients classified as Masaoka stages I, II, III, or IV were 4, 22, 8, and 5, and those classified WHO type A, AB, B1, B2, B3, or thymic cancer were 1, 4, 13, 11, 7 and 3, respectively. Eight patients were complicated by MG, and 5 underwent IT. For IT, patients basically received a unified multiagent chemotherapeutic
Comment
According to the results of this study, FDG-PET SUVmax tended to be higher for advanced-stage tumors and those at a higher malignant grade with a large amount of epithelial components, especially in thymic cancer. In addition, because a strong correlation between SUVmax and Ki-67 LI was confirmed, SUVmax was demonstrated to reflect proliferation and invasiveness and can provide an index for diagnosis and treatment. SUVmax is also useful for evaluating IT efficacy and detecting relapse; thus,
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