Preoperative prediction of the pathological stage of advanced gastric cancer by (18)F-fluoro-2-deoxyglucose positron emission tomography

In recent years, the usefulness of neoadjuvant chemotherapy for resectable advanced gastric cancer, particularly stage III, has been reported. Preoperative staging is mainly determined by computed tomography (CT), and the usefulness of (18)F-fluoro-2-deoxyglucose positron emission tomography/CT (FDG-PET/CT) for gastric cancer has been limited in usefulness. The study aimed to evaluate the usefulness of FDG-PET/CT in preoperative diagnosis of advanced gastric cancer. We retrospectively enrolled 113 patients with gastric cancer who underwent preoperative FDG-PET/CT. All patients underwent gastrectomy with lymph-node dissection. The maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax) of the primary tumor (T-SUVmax) and lymph nodes (N-SUVmax) were measured for all patients. The cutoff values of T-SUVmax for pathological T3/4 from receiver operating characteristic analysis were 8.28 for differentiated and 4.32 for undifferentiated types. The T-SUVmax and N-SUVmax cutoff values for pathological lymph-node metastasis were 4.32 and 1.82, respectively. Multivariate analysis showed that T-SUVmax for differentiated types was a significant predictor of pathological T3/4, and N-SUVmax was a significant predictor of lymph-node metastasis. In conclusion, the SUVmax of FDG-PET/CT was a useful predictor of pathological T3/4 and lymph-node metastasis in gastric cancer. The diagnosis by preoperative FDG-PET/CT is promising to contribute a more accurate staging of gastric cancer than by CT scan alone.