Paper of the Month December

Time to Prepare for Risk Adaptation in Lymphoma by Standardizing Measurement of Metabolic Tumor Burden

J Nucl Med. 2019 Aug;60(8):1096-1102

 Sally F. Barrington¹ and Michel Meignan²

¹Guy’s and St. Thomas’ PET Centre, School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King’s College London, King’s Health Partners, London, United Kingdom; and

²Lymphoma Study Association–Imaging (LYSA-IM), Functional Imaging and Therapeutics Department, Henri Mondor University Hospitals, University Paris Est Créteil, Créteil, France

Link to Pubmed

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Comment

This review article presents a positive multi-center initiative under the auspices of the PET International Lymphoma and Myeloma Workshop, preparing the use of metabolic tumour burden in lymphoma management. Indeed, studies showed that baseline total metabolic tumour volume (MTV) and/or total lesion glycolysis (TLG) are strong prognostic factors in lymphomas. However, harmonization of MTV (and TLG) measurement is needed before using it in prospective clinical trials and eventually in clinical routine practice.

The authors discuss the steps that will be required for the standardization of MTV measurement, including the agreement on which tumour areas should be included in the MTV, the segmentation method to be used and software solutions that should be commercially available worldwide.

Their proposal is attractive as in the end of their work, end-users will be able to test their ability to estimate MTV in a benchmark dataset and compare obtained MTV to the expected values.

We hope you will appreciate the overview of this work presented in the slides.

The BELNUC board