Article
Author: Chin, Frederick T. ; Raymundo, Roan C. ; van den Berg, Nynke S. ; Hom, Marisa ; Shen, Bin ; Rosenthal, Eben L. ; Duan, Heying ; Valencia, Alex ; Colevas, A. Dimitrios ; Ferri, Valentina ; Iagaru, Andrei ; Martin, Brock A. ; Baik, Fred M. ; Zhou, Quan ; Koran, Mary Ellen ; Kaplan, Michael J. ; Lee, Yu-Jin ; Castillo, Jessa ; Freeman, Laura ; Azevedo, E. Carmen
Purpose::Determine the safety and specificity of a tumor-targeted radiotracer (89Zr-pan) in combination with 18F-FDG PET/CT to improve diagnostic accuracy in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC).
Experimental Design::Adult patients with biopsy-proven HNSCC scheduled for standard-of-care surgery were enrolled in a clinical trial and underwent systemic administration of 89Zirconium-panitumumab and panitumumab-IRDye800 followed by preoperative 89Zr-pan PET/CT and intraoperative fluorescence imaging. The sensitivity, specificity, and AUC were evaluated.
Results::A total of fourteen patients were enrolled and completed the study. Four patients (28.5%) had areas of high 18F-FDG uptake outside the head and neck region with maximum standardized uptake values (SUVmax) greater than 2.0 that were not detected on 89Zr-pan PET/CT. These four patients with incidental findings underwent further workup and had no evidence of cancer on biopsy or clinical follow-up. Forty-eight lesions (primary tumor, LNs, incidental findings) with SUVmax ranging 2.0–23.6 were visualized on 18F-FDG PET/CT; 34 lesions on 89Zr-pan PET/CT with SUVmax ranging 0.9–10.5. The combined ability of 18F-FDG PET/CT and 89Zr-pan PET/CT to detect HNSCC in the whole body was improved with higher specificity of 96.3% [confidence interval (CI), 89.2%–100%] compared to 18F-FDG PET/CT alone with specificity of 74.1% (CI, 74.1%–90.6%). One possibly related grade 1 adverse event of prolonged QTc (460 ms) was reported but resolved in follow-up.
Conclusions::89Zr-pan PET/CT imaging is safe and may be valuable in discriminating incidental findings identified on 18F-FDG PET/CT from true positive lesions and in localizing metastatic LNs.