The impact of positron emission tomography/computed tomography addition to contrast-enhanced computed tomography findings during radiation treatment planning of locally advanced carcinoma esophagus

Conclusions: PET-CT tremendously changes treatment plans by expanding the gross tumor volume and including regions which might otherwise have been missed on purely CT-based plans. Of the 50 patients, it changed the contouring and treatment planning of 35 patients and did not impact the remaining 15. Whether this translates into better long-term controls requires further validation by randomized controlled trials, which was not our present objective.
Source: Journal of Medical Physics - Category: Physics Authors: Source Type: research