[Nuclear medicine diagnosis of bone metastases]
1Nuklearmedizin/Radiologie, Kantonsspital Luzern. klaus.strobel@ksl.ch
Abstract:
Conventional bone scintigraphy is still the standard investigation for the detection of bone metastases, especially in breast and prostate cancer. In unclear scintigraphic uptakes in the appendicular skeleton conventional x-rays are problem solving in most of the cases. In unclear uptakes in the axial skeleton additional performance of SPECT/CT can increase the specificity. Fluoride-PET/CT is superior to conventional bone scintigraphy but is not yet available in clinical routine. Patients with high-risk breast cancer and patients with lung cancer should be staged with FDG-PET/CT primarily. An additional bone scan is than superfluous. The great advantage of FDG-PET/CT is the fact that bone metastases and organ metastases can be detected in the same investigation. There is a clear trend of shifting patients from conventional nuclear medicine to PET/CT.
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