title: Comparison of various criteria in interpreting end of therapy F-18 labeled fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography in patients with aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
abstract: Various interpretation criteria exist to assess end of therapy F-18 labeled fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography (FDG PET/CT) in lymphoma. This study was carried out to compare these criteria. Data of 69 patients with aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma (AGR-NHL) who underwent FDG PET/CT at the end of therapy and were followed up for a minimum period of 1 year (median follow-up period 17 months) were evaluated. Twenty-eight of the 69 patients were found to have residual/recurrent disease during follow-up. The accuracy for predicting residual disease of International Harmonization Project (IHP) criteria, London criteria and Gallamini criteria was 71.0%, 84.0% and 88.4%, respectively. Gallamini and London criteria had greater accuracies in predicting residual disease than IHP criteria (p = 0.0001). The major difference in accuracy was due to the low positive predictive value of IHP criteria. Positive predictive values (PPVs) of both London and Gallamini criteria (79.3% and 88.5%, respectively) were high when compared with that of IHP criteria (60.5%) (p = 0.001). Negative predictive values (NPVs) were similar for all the criteria. In conclusion, Gallamini and London criteria had higher accuracy when interpreting end of therapy FDG PET/CT studies in AGR-NHL. London criteria can be used preferentially over Gallamini criteria because of simplicity in interpretation and reproducibility.
authors.affiliation: Department of Nuclear Medicine and PET, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India.
authors.forename: Kuruva
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Manohar
authors.forename: Bhagwant Rai
authors.initials: BR
authors.lastname: Mittal
authors.forename: Senthil
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Raja
authors.forename: Anish
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bhattacharya
authors.forename: Pankaj
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Malhotra
authors.forename: Subhash
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Varma
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D019788:Fluorodeoxyglucose F18; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D008228:Lymphoma, Non-Hodgkin / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000401:mortality / Q000628:therapy; D008297:Male; D064847:Multimodal Imaging; D009367:Neoplasm Staging; D049268:Positron-Emission Tomography; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D014055:Tomography, Emission-Computed; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed
chemical_list: D019788:Fluorodeoxyglucose F18