Nuclear medicine communications
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Accurate diagnosis and staging in oncology is essential in the evaluation of cancer for optimal patient outcome. Conventional imaging techniques, such as computed tomography (CT), rely basically on morphological changes for tumour detection. Clinical experience, however, shows that morphological criteria may be misleading and may not always allow differentiation between benign and malignant lesions. ⋯ In addition, because of the utilization of the CT transmission information for the correction of the attenuation of the PET emission data (and for the reconstruction of the PET images), some artifacts may be generated. As a consequence, CT based attenuation correction of PET images may result in erroneous PET/CT interpretations. The aim of this extensively illustrated paper is to demonstrate several potential pitfalls encountered during the interpretation of PET/CT images so that radiologists can avoid false positive diagnoses and recognize inherently non-specific findings on PET/CT images obtained for oncological diagnosis.