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Suture granuloma showing false-positive finding on PET/CT after head and neck cancer surgery
Masahiro Kikuchi1, Yuji Nakamoto, Shogo Shinohara
1Department of Otolaryngology, Kobe City Medical Center General Hospital, 4-6 Minatojima-Nakamachi, Chuo-ku, Kobe 650-0046, Japan.
Abstract:
We report herein two cases of suture granuloma showing focal intense 2-deoxy-2-[(18)F]fluoro-d-glucose (FDG)-uptake in positron emission tomography (PET). Follow-up FDG-PET after surgical intervention for head and neck cancer revealed lesions with high FDG-uptake, which were highly suspected of being a recurrent tumor. The lesions were subjected to excisional biopsy for definitive diagnosis. Histopathological examination proved them to be suture granulomas caused by non-absorbable silk sutures. It should be emphasized that suture granulomas can show false-positive findings on FDG-PET, thus requiring differential diagnosis from recurrent tumors.
