THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF 18F-FDG PET

The incidence of oncological diseases has become very high in the last decade, whether we refer to more or less developed countries. The incidence of the oncologic disease continue to increases in spite of substantial progress in the development of medicine and medical technologies. At the same time, an efficient treatment depends on an accurate and timely diagnostic. A solution for precise diagnostic is provided by nuclear medicine through the positron emission tomography (PET) technique, which allows an accurate evaluation of metabolism in different organs and tissues. PET permits timely identification of functional disturbances underlying the development of the disease. In the past decade’s positron emission (PET) 18F-fluoro-deoxy-glucose (18F-FDG) has been used to evaluate tumor patients. Evaluation of distribution, spread and proliferation of cancerous cells is considered to be useful for therapeutic guidance and therapeutic effect assessment. Thus, radiolabeled molecules, such as the [18F]-2-Fluoro-2-deoxy-β-D-glucopyranose has been developed. Fluorine-18 is a short-lived positron emitting isotope which finds a massive use as a label for radiotracers used with the molecular imaging technique of PET. The Quality Control (QC) process concerns all the mechanisms, actions and tools developed to detect the presence of errors in a production batch. This review focuses on the importance of 18F-FDG and our goal was to present some theoretical and practical aspects of the 18F-FDG synthesis and what parameters and how should they be evaluated in QC laboratories.