Why And When To Request For A Pet/Ct Scan In A Lung Cancer Patient?

This review will focus on whole-body functional imaging applied to lung cancer disease and patient management. Lung cancer needs to be avoided… (but if not well succeeded), suspected, screened, histologically confirmed, anatomically inventoried, prognostically staged, molecularly characterized, genetically studied and finally, therapeutically managed. Functional imaging using 18F-fluoro-deoxy-glucose (FDG) is a non-invasive method that is widely used in oncologic disease, mainly for clinical staging and re-staging, with impact on therapy planning. For lung cancer, the functional imaging with FDG-PET/CT is used for clinical staging and also to provide information on a pre-diagnostic phase, to categorize lung nodules according to the metabolic risk of malignancy. Clinicians need to be aware of the different possibilities of the functional imaging information, to provide the better use of it. This review will focus on data from the different medical fields that are considered important to informed decision making when asking for functional imaging in the daily clinical routine of a lung cancer patient.