FDG-PET showed more extensive disease in two of the three patients for which FDG-PET and conventional staging disagreed.
That's partly due to the fact that we were able to keep ticket prices well below what you'd expect to pay for a conventional staging.
This, it has to be said, was rather a conventional staging of a play that can, all too easily, become twee and hammy.
Overall staging by FDG-PET agreed with conventional staging exams in 15/18 833%) patients (κ=0.67), which included eight extensive and seven limited cases.
Until now the results of this strategy have been decidedly underwhelming, with the film director Herbert Ross making the only substantial contribution to the cross-pollination when he supervised a conventional staging of "La Boheme" in 1993.
Though it's hard to understand why anyone would want to memorialise Jonathan Kent's drearily conventional staging, the two performances with this trio are being recorded for cinema presentation in the autumn and presumably for a subsequent DVD.
Some patients with advanced stage tumors are deemed 'unresectable' by conventional staging criteria (e.g. liver metastasis), yet progress slowly.
FDG-PET/CT has now largely replaced conventional staging that included a bone scan, abdominal echography and chest x-ray.
Because conventional staging systems, like the TNM staging system, have shown important limitations for classifying patients, several new systems have recently been proposed [13].
Cost-effectiveness of preoperative PET has been proven with, for example, prevention of unnecessary surgery in one out of five patients with suspected non-small-cell lung cancer after the addition of [18F]FDG-PET imaging to conventional staging [32].
Positron emission tomography (PET)/CT is a useful diagnostic modality in the event of equivocal findings on conventional staging techniques, especially in patients with locally advanced or metastatic disease [1].
