Positron emission tomography and perfusion weighted imaging in the detection of brain tumors recurrence: A meta-analysis

OBJECTIVES: To assess and compare the diagnostic accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of perfusion-weighted imaging (PWI) and positron emission tomography (PET) in distinguishing between treatment-related changes and tumor recurrence. METHODS: We carried out a systematic review of PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library, and CINAHL databases from database inception until August 2021 for pertinent articles. Particular inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to select the eligible studies. The Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy tool was used to assess the risk of bias and methodological quality of the eligible studies. From the included studies, the rate ratio (RR) of pooled accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and their corresponding confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated for both PWI and PET. RESULTS: The systematic review and meta-analysis comprised 14 research studies, with a total of 542 patients. Although PET revealed a moderately higher accuracy and sensitivity when compared to PWI (RR: 0.94, 95% CI 0.86-1.02 and RR: 0.95 95% CI 0.85-1.06, respectively), the difference was not statistically significant (p>0.05). Similarly, while PWI demonstrated a moderately higher specificity when compared to PET (RR:1.10, 95% CI 0.98-1.23) but. However, no statistically significant difference between the 2 modalities was detected (p>0.05). Interestingly, we revealed that 18F-FET-PET was significantly more efficient than PWI in terms of accuracy (RR: 0.82, 95% CI 0.72-0.93) and sensitivity (RR: 0.72, 95% CI 0.62-0.83) (p>0.05). CONCLUSION: Both PET and PWI yielded good diagnostic performance in distinguishing treatment-related changes from tumor recurrence, and neither modality seemed to be superior. PROSPERO ID: CRD42021288160