The Potential of Dedicated Breast PET with a Ring-type Scanner—Basic Evaluation and Clinical Experience—

Abstract

In breast cancer, the survival rate is related to the size of the lesion. Since the spatial resolution of whole-body (WB)-PET is limited, it is difficult to evaluate small cancerous lesions. To improve resolution, high-resolution dedicated breast PET (db-PET) scanners have been developed. However, the potential of db-PET has not yet been established, and there has been no report of the application of db-PET on an Oncovision device (MAMMI) in breast cancer cases in Japan.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the potential of db-PET for assessing breast cancer. The influence of image reconstruction parameters was verified in a phantom evaluation, while we quantitatively investigated the ability of dB-PET to detect tumors, in comparison with WB-PET, with patients in the prone position, in a clinical evaluation. Despite a limited field of view in the vicinity of the chest wall, we show that db-PET has markedly better clinical value for diagnosing breast cancer as compared to WB-PET.