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ABSTRACT: Background
significance of incidental thyroid 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-D-glucose ([18F]FDG) uptake on positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) scans remains controversial. We aimed to evaluate the ability of [18F]FDG-PET/CT texture analysis to predict final diagnosis in thyroid incidentaloma.Methods
We retrospectively evaluated medical records of all patients who performed a [18F]FDG-PET/CT from January 2012 to October 2016. Those patients who presented a thyroid incidentaloma described in the medical records and performed a fine needle aspiration in our institution were considered for the analysis. Cytological and/or histological results were used as reference standard to define the final diagnosis. In case of negative cytology, the nodule was considered benign. In case of non-diagnostic or inconclusive results ultrasound, follow-up and further cytology/histology were used as final diagnosis. For suspected or positive cytological result, histology was used as reference standard. PET images were segmented using a General Electric AW workstation running PET VCAR software (GE Healthcare, Waukesha, WI, USA) settled with a threshold of 40% SUVmax. LifeX software (http://www.lifexsoft.org) was used to perform texture analysis. Statistical analysis was performed with R package (https://www.r-project.org).Results
We identified 55 patients with incidental thyroid [18F]FDG uptake. Five patients were excluded from the analysis because a final diagnosis was not available. Thirty-two out of 50 patients had benign nodules while in 18/50 cases a malignancy (primary thyroid cancer = 15, metastases = 3) was diagnosed. Conventional PET parameters and histogram-based features were calculated for all 50 patients, while other matrices-based features were available for 28/50 patients. SUVmax and skewness resulted significantly different in benign and malignant nodules (p = 0.01 and = 0.02, respectively). Using ROC analysis, seven features were identified as potential predictors. Among all the textural features tested, skewness showed the best area under the curve (=?0.66). SUV-based parameters resulted in the highest specificity while MTV, TLG, skewness and kurtosis, as well as correlationGLCM resulted better in sensitivity.Conclusions
[18F]FDG-PET/CT texture analysis seems to be a promising approach to stratify the patients with thyroid incidentaloma identified on PET scans, with respect to the risk of the diagnosis of a malignant thyroid nodule and thus, could refine the selection of the patients to be referred for cytology.
SUBMITTER: Sollini M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5954705 | biostudies-literature | 2017
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Sollini M M Cozzi L L Pepe G G Antunovic L L Lania A A Di Tommaso L L Magnoni P P Erba P A PA Kirienko M M
European journal of hybrid imaging 20171012 1
<h4>Background</h4>significance of incidental thyroid 2-deoxy-2-[<sup>18</sup>F]fluoro-D-glucose ([<sup>18</sup>F]FDG) uptake on positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) scans remains controversial. We aimed to evaluate the ability of [<sup>18</sup>F]FDG-PET/CT texture analysis to predict final diagnosis in thyroid incidentaloma.<h4>Methods</h4>We retrospectively evaluated medical records of all patients who performed a [<sup>18</sup>F]FDG-PET/CT from January 2012 to October 201 ...[more]