Whole body FDG-PET/CT for the assessment of bone marrow infiltration in patients with newly diagnosed lymphoma

Abstract

Background: Positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) and bone marrow biopsy are currently the common clinical examination of lymphoma infiltration. The aim of this research is to evaluate the value of PET-CT in diagnosis of bone marrow infiltration, clinical staging and pathological typing of lymphoma.

Methods: 153 cases were analyzed retrospectively to compare the consistency of PET-CT and bone marrow biopsy. We analyzed the sensitivity, accuracy and specificity of PET-CT in different clinical pathology of lymphoma.

Results: The PET-CT sensitivity in detecting bone marrow infiltration is 54.3% with a specificity of 80.5% and accuracy of 74.5%. In aggressive B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL, HG-BL) and MZL, PET-CT results of bone marrow infiltration showed high accuracy of 88.1% and 83.3% respectively. The median value of SUVmax in the patients detected to have bone marrow infiltration by BMB was significantly higher than patients with BMB negative results among subgroups of aggressive B-cell lymphoma, MZL and T-NHL (p<.05).

Conclusion: PET-CT is significant in detecting bone marrow infiltration in certain pathological types of lymphoma. However pathological inconsistencies still exist between bone marrow biopsy and PET-CT, thus PET-CT cannot completely replace biopsy.

Keywords: Ann Arbor stage; Bone marrow infiltration; Estadificación de Ann Arbor; Infiltración de la médula ósea; Linfoma; Lymphoma; PET/TC; PET–CT; SUVmax; SUVmáx.