Detection of clinically silent brain lesions in [18F]FDG PET/CT study in oncological patients: analysis of over 10,000 studies

The study aimed to show that including the brain region into the standard 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-d-glucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography ([18F]FDG PET/CT) study protocol may result in detecting clinically silent brain tumours. We retrospectively analyzed the group of 10,378 from the total of 12,011 consecutive patients who underwent the torso and brain [18F]FDG PET/CT scanning, considering an ability of the method to evaluate undetected before brain tumours in patients diagnosed and treated in our institution. While collecting the database, we followed the inclusion criteria: at least 1-year of follow-up, a full medical history collected in our institution, histopathologic examination or other studies available to confirm the type of observed lesion, and the most importantly—no brain lesions reported in the patients’ medical data. In this study, performing the torso and brain [18F]FDG PET/CT imaging helped to detect clinically silent primary and metastatic brain tumours in 129 patients, and the benign lesions in 24 studied cases, in whom no suspicious brain findings were reported prior to the examination. In conclusion, including the brain region into the standard [18F]FDG PET/CT protocol can be considered helpful in detecting clinically silent malignant and benign brain tumours.