To study the correlation between ¹⁸F-FDG uptake and cell proliferation in cancer patients by meta-analysis of published articles. We searched PubMed (MEDLINE included), EMBASE, and Cochrane Database of Systematic Review, and selected research articles on the relationship between ¹⁸F-FDG uptake and Ki-67 expression (published between August 1, 1994-August 1, 2014), according to the literature inclusion and exclusion criteria. The publishing language was limited to English. The quality of included articles was evaluated according to the Quality Assessment of Diagnosis Accuracy Studies-2 (QUADAS-2). The correlation coefficient (r) was extracted from the included articles and processed by Fisher's r-to-z transformation. The combined correlation coefficient (r) and the 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated with STATA 11.0 software under a random-effects model. Begg's test was used to analyze the existence of publication bias and draw funnel plot, and the sources of heterogeneity were explored by sensitivity and subgroup analyses. According to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 79 articles were finally included, including 81 studies involving a total of 3242 patients. All the studies had a combined r of 0.44 (95% CI, 0.41-0.46), but with a significant heterogeneity (I² = 80.9%, P<0.01). Subgroup analysis for different tumor types indicated that most subgroups showed a reduced heterogeneity. Malignant melanoma (n = 1) had the minimum correlation coefficient (-0.22) between ¹⁸F-FDG uptake and Ki-67 expression, while the thymic epithelial tumors (TETs; n = 2) showed the maximum correlation coefficient of 0.81. The analytical results confirmed that correlation between ¹⁸F-FDG uptake and Ki-67 expression was extremely significant in TETs, significant in gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs), moderate in patients with lung, breast, bone and soft tissue, pancreatic, oral, thoracic, and uterine and ovarian cancers, average in brain, esophageal and colorectal cancers, and poor in head and neck, thyroid, gastric and malignant melanoma tumors. Subgroup analysis indicated that positron emission tomography (PET) or PET/CT imaging technology or Ki-67 and standardized uptake value (SUV) measurement technology did not significantly affect the results of r values, and Begg's test showed no significant publication bias. In cancer patients, ¹⁸F-FDG uptake showed a moderate positive correlation with tumor cell proliferation. Different tumor types exhibited varied degree of correlation, and the correlation was significant in TETs and GSTs. However, our results need further validation by clinical trials with a large sample of different tumor types.

Lung tumor segmentation in PET-CT images plays an important role to assist physicians in clinical application to accurately diagnose and treat lung cancer. However, it is still a challenging task in medical image processing field. Due to respiration and movement, the lung tumor varies largely in PET images and CT images. Even the two images are almost simultaneously collected and registered, the shape and size of lung tumors in PET-CT images are different from each other. To address these issues, a modality-specific segmentation network (MoSNet) is proposed for lung tumor segmentation in PET-CT images. MoSNet can simultaneously segment the modality-specific lung tumor in PET images and CT images. MoSNet learns a modality-specific representation to describe the inconsistency between PET images and CT images and a modality-fused representation to encode the common feature of lung tumor in PET images and CT images. An adversarial method is proposed to minimize an approximate modality discrepancy through an adversarial objective with respect to a modality discriminator and reserve modality-common representation. This improves the representation power of the network for modality-specific lung tumor segmentation in PET images and CT images. The novelty of MoSNet is its ability to produce a modality-specific map that explicitly quantifies the modality-specific weights for the features in each modality. To demonstrate the superiority of our method, MoSNet is validated in 126 PET-CT images with NSCLC. Experimental results show that MoSNet reaches 75.52$\pm$18.65% (Dice) in CT images and 75.52$\pm$18.65% (Dice) in PET images, respectively, and also outperforms state-of-the-art lung tumor segmentation methods.

Objective:This study aimed to evaluate18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography-computed tomography (18F-FDG PET-CT) for diagnosis, targeted biopsy and therapy of relapsing polychondritis (RP).Methods:The literature pertaining to the use of 18F-FDG PET-CT in patients with RP was retrieved from the Cochrane Library, PubMed, EMBASE, CNKI and Wanfang databases until July 2015. Clinical characteristics, auxiliary examination results, chest CT findings, tracheoscopy and biopsy findings, high metabolic activity lesions, maximum standardized uptake values (SUVmax), 18F-FDG PET-CT-guided biopsy site, pathologic results of biopsy samples, and alteration in high 18F-FDG-uptake lesions after treatment were retrospectively analyzed.Results:Eighteen publications with 26 cases were enrolled. The 5 most common symptoms of RP patients diagnosed with 18F-FDG PET-CT were cough, fever, chest tightness, sore throat, and arthralgia. Of the 26 patients, 23 had multiple and symmetric cartilage lesions with high metabo...

We aimed at comparing the Durie–Salmon Plus (DS Plus) staging system based on Italian Myeloma criteria for PET USe (IMPeTUs) with other two staging systems in predicting prognosis of patients with all stages of newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (MM). A total of 33 MM patients were enrolled in this retrospective study. The variation between the DS Plus classification and Durie–Salmon staging system (DSS) or Revised International Staging System (RISS) classification was assessed. When staged by the DSS, patients in stage I and stage II did not reach the median overall survival (OS), and the median OS was 33 months for stage III (p=0.3621). When staged by the DS Plus, patients in stage I did not reach the median OS of stage I, and the median OS for stages II and III was 38 and nine months, respectively (p=0.0064). When staged by the RISS, patients in stage I did not reach the median OS, and the median OS was 33 and 16 months for stage II and stage III, respectively (p=0.0319). The concordances between two staging systems were 0.07 (DS Plus versus DSS) and 0.37 (DS Plus versus RISS), respectively. Multivariate analysis revealed that DS Plus stage III (HR: 11.539,p=0.021) and the Deauville score of bone marrow ≥4 (HR: 3.487,p=0.031) were independent prognostic factors associated with OS. Both the DS Plus based on IMPeTUs and RISS possessed a better potential in characterizing and stratifying MM patients compared with the DSS. Moreover, DS Plus stage III and the Deauville score of bone marrow ≥4 were reliable prognostic factors in newly diagnosed MM patients.

Aim: In the present study, we aimed to characterize the tumor-targeting properties of ultra-small iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) as multimodality imaging contrast agent. Methods: The dimeric cRGD peptides [cyclic(Cys-Arg-Gly-Asp-dSer-Cys)-Tyr-dSer-Lys-Tyr-cyclic(Cys-Arg-Gly-Asp-dSer-Cys)], which specifically targeted integrin-α_vβ₃ receptor highly overexpressed in tumor vasculature and tumor cells, were covalently conjugated onto the surface of ultra-small IONPs followed by the labeling of nuclide ¹²⁵I^- through the chloramine-T method to afford the desired ¹²⁵I-(cRGD)₂-IONPs nanoprobe.¹²⁵I-(cRGD)₂-IONPs were injected into tumor-bearing mice for magnetic resonance (MR) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) multi-modality imaging of tumors. Results: The prepared IONPs demonstrated were very useful for T1/T2 and SPECT imaging of tumors in vivo, exhibiting a high tumor uptake of a clinically useful target-to-background ratio in a short time. Conclusion: We successfully developed a novel integrin-α_vβ₃ receptor-targeted ultra-small IONPs, which could be successfully used as T1-T2-MRI/SPECT contrast agents for high-resolution and high-sensitivity of tumor imaging in vivo.