Original Article FDG-PET Imaging for Lymph Node Staging and Pathologic Tumor Response after Neoadjuvant Treatment of Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emis-sion tomography (FDG-PET) is effective for staging of lung cancer. However, the efficacy ofFDG-PET for staging lung cancer after neoadjuvant treatment is still controversial. Thisstudy compared FDG-PET and computed tomography (CT) for lung cancer staging, andevaluated the ability of the two methods to predict the pathologic response of the primarytumor to neoadjuvant treatment.Patients and Methods: Twenty-two patients who underwent neoadjuvant treatment followedby surgery were investigated. Eighteen patients received chemoradiotherapy and four pa-tients received chemotherapy only. One hundred and three lymph node stations in the 22patients were evaluated by FDG-PET and CT. The pathologic responses of the tumors werecompared by FDG-uptake and tumor size on CT for the 15 patients who underwent FDG-PET and CT both before and after neoadjuvant treatment.Results: There was no significant difference in the ability of FDG-PET or CT to predictresidual viable tumor. Although positive predictive value by FDG-PET (0.29) was lower thanthat by CT (0.64) (p