News

We are happy to share the recent paper on clinically silent brain lesions in oncological patients published in Nature Scientific Reports by Dr. Agata Pietrzak, Msc, Phd, from PUMS Department of Electroradiology and her colleagues.

“Detecting both the benign and malignant brain tumours may be considered vital for the patient’s outcome, and can be often considered life-saving. In this study, we presented the data supporting the hypothesis that including the brain region into the daily [18F]FDG PET/CT procedure performance can provide the valuable data regarding the developing brain pathology despite the commonly recognized study limitations.”

Dr. Pietrzak: "The radiopharmaceutical [18F]FDG is one of the most used and accessible radiotracers for oncological diseases’ evaluation. However, a high glucose uptake within the cortex often results in a low sensitivity and specificity of the method in the brain tumours diagnosis. Thus, many of the nuclear medicine departments exclude the brain region from the standard [18F]FDG PET/CT study protocol.

Altogether with my Colleagues, we decided to evaluate the usefulness of the [18F]FDG PET/CT method in the brain lesions detection to show that there is still a room for the [18F]FDG in the brain diagnosis despite the tracer’s limitations, especially considering the low accessibility of the more specific radiopharmaceuticals.

I would like thank my Colleagues and Students who participated in this study for the past two years of hard, yet very important work. Special thanks to Prof. Julian Malicki for supporting this project and to my friends and advisors: Prof. Witold Cholewiński, Prof. Andrzej Marszałek, Prof. Jolanta Kunikowska & Prof. Tomasz Piotrowski for their faith in the purpose of the study and the constant encouragement to keep it going.

Thank you, EANM Technologists Committee and EANM Women Empowerment Task Force for their friendship and support."

The full publication is available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-98004-w.