[PET-CT for nuclear medicine diagnostics of multiple myeloma]

Functional or morphofunctional imaging modalities are used in myeloma patients for the diagnosis and therapy management within research protocols. Despite new staging criteria, which take into account the viability of a myeloma lesion, positron emission tomography (PET) is not used routinely.

The impact of PET is therefore open. The role of PET and PET computed tomography (PET-CT) for the diagnosis and therapy management is discussed.

The use of PET with 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) allows the measurement of viable myeloma lesions and correlates with the stage of disease. A negative FDG examination correlates with a better prognosis. Furthermore, the number of focal lesions as well as the whole functional volume of myeloma lesions in FDG have a prognostic impact. Several studies have demonstrated the impact of FDG for the assessment of therapy monitoring and show that FDG is an earlier indicator for therapy response as compared to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The CT component of the new hybrid systems allows the assessment of osteolytic lesions in CT and their viability in FDG. The combination of PET with an MRT scanner allows the simultaneous measurement of bone marrow infiltration, focal lesions and their viability.

The use of modern hybrid scanners, such as PET-CT and PET-MRT facilitates the simultaneous measurement of viable myeloma lesions, osteolytic lesions and bone marrow infiltration in the whole body; therefore, it is expected that these imaging modalities will play a greater role both in diagnosis and therapy management.