Review

POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET) IN BREAST CANCER DIAGNOSIS

  • Haluk Burçak Sayman

Received Date: 24.10.2008 Accepted Date: 21.11.2008 Eur J Breast Health 2009;5(2):69-72

Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer in women and is the second lethal malignancy after lung cancer. Screening mammography is widely used for its diagnosis, but it has a considerably high false negativity rate. Various factors has effects on the sensitivity of mammography and its specificity is low. MRI and ultrasonography are complementary methods for the difficult cases but there is still need for determining the benign or malignant nature of the breast masses. In this respect, nuclear medicine extended its useful contributions by scintimammography after the use of specific substances such as Tc-99m MIBI and further improved with the Positron Emission Tomography. In this review the benefits of PET in the diagnosis of breast cancer and its methods are reported

Keywords: breast cancer, nuclear medicine, PET