The SUVmax Value in Differentiating benign or malign CC in PET SCAN

Hi,
A short and easy abstract to understand the SUVmax value in Pet scan for caregiver and patient.

(just read the “CONCLUSION” if you are not interested in the details,but it helps a lot in understanding the process of how the authors obtain the conclusion of the study.)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21892037

Also the activity of the cancer is not only related to the SUV value ALONE but the size(or more precisely,the volume of the CC.) as well. As the following copied message shows:

SUV is correlated with risk of recurrence and worse outcomes, but this isn’t so well established that there are cut-off numbers or a process — it’s just trends that have been observed in limited studies, although pretty much all of the studies agree on the conclusion. I’ve written a bit about PET scans in a post about the subject. A higher number correlates with higher metabolic activity, but it’s also related to the volume of cells; a 1 cm lymph node with an SUV of 4 or 6 is very concerning, more so than a larger nodule witht he same SUV, because something small would have to be very metabolically active to have that level of uptake on the scan (fewer cells generating such a strong signal would have to be particularly active). So the SUV can really be interpreted relative to the volume of what is generating it. But that’s just a general idea. There is no number that is completely safe, and there are even cancers that don’t show up on PET scans, and there are also diseases like sarcoidosis that can have very high PET uptake but don’t mean cancer. AJ, I would not presume that the PET scan has any relationship at all with your cancer. If it’s from sarcoid, your PET SUV should have nothing to do with cancer recurrence.

While lower numbers are in general better than higher numbers, I would not feel comfortable saying that there’s a number that is unlikely to be cancer and a higher number that is definitely cancer. It really needs to be interpreted in context, which is why many radiologists do special training to become sophisticated at interpreting PET scans.

-Dr. West