Comparison of effects of 18F-FDG PET-CT and MRI in identifying and grading gliomas

Glioma is the most common type of brain tumor. Malignant gliomas tend to have an increasingly higher incidence and are difficult to treat. Therefore, an accurate diagnosis of the grade of glioma before surgery is very important for planning surgery and determining prognosis. To compare the values of ¹⁸F-deoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computer tomography (¹⁸F-FDG PET-CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for identifying and grading gliomas, we selected 70 patients who were diagnosed as having a primary glioma or suspected glioma at the People’s Hospital of Liaocheng in Shandong, China, and divided them into an observation group, which was examined by ¹⁸F-FDG PET-CT and a control group, which was examined by MRI. Image analysis, visual semi-quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, follow-up and pathological results of the two groups were compared. Specificity, accuracy and sensitivity of brain MRI and PET-CT in grading the gliomas were calculated, and the results obtained were processed by Chi-squared test. Standard uptake value (SUV), SUV_correct and L/WM (SUV_max ratio of a lesion to normal white matters in the opposite side) of FDG in the different grades of glioma were analyzed by single-factor variance analysis. Postoperative pathological detection confirmed 47 cases of glioma; the sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of PET-CT in grading glioma were all higher than those of MRI (P less than 0.05); the correlation between SUV and glioma grade, between SUV_correct and glioma grade, and between L/WM and glioma had significant difference (P less than 0.05). Thus, it was concluded that ¹⁸F-FDG PET-CT performs better in diagnosing gliomas than MRI and is also more suitable for identifying different grades of glioma.