A Tabulated Summary of the FDG PET Literature

This report contains spreadsheets summarizing all FDG PET literature. A spreadsheet is provided for each disease under consideration, along with summary spreadsheets (see Table 1, lung cancer, as an example). On each specific disease spreadsheet, the name of the disease appears in the upper left-hand corner. The data is broken down into applications of FDG PET for diagnosis, staging, recurrence, monitoring response, and other applications. Some diseases include a mixture of these applications and, therefore, have multiple listings in several categories.

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TABLE 1 FDG PET in Lung Cancer: Results of Literature Search

For each disease, the first author and year of publication of the article or abstract are listed in the far left column. The second column designates "A" for abstract or "RA" for research article. The third column lists the purpose of the study. The fourth column lists the total number of patients who were included initially in the study. The fifth column lists the total number of patient studies actually implemented and upon which results data were calculated (sometimes less than the total in the fourth column, because of patient drop out or other causes, and sometimes greater than the total in the fourth column, because multiple PET scans may have been counted). In some applications in which lesions were counted, a column is also listed for the number of lesions studied. Studies using nondedicated PET are indicated. Several additional columns show the percentages for sensitivity, specificity, predictive value, and accuracy for FDG PET and CT. The gold standard used for verifying FDG PET results is also listed in a separate column. If percent management changes were available, they are listed in the last column. Finally, beneath each table are footnotes highlighting details from specific studies to further clarify how the study populations were either composed or counted. Abbreviations used throughout the tables are listed alphabetically in Appendix C.

A summary for each application is provided in bold. The bolded summary totals for number of patients, number of patient studies, and number of lesions reflect the totals retrieved from the literature for all studies listing data that is inclusive of that application. Each study entry is listed with complete reported data that may include data relevant to several applications. This accounts for data repeated across applications within a given spreadsheet and is discussed in Appendix A. From within each application are selected the respective study data applicable to that application (e.g., recurrence data in instances in which both staging and recurrence data may have been listed in a given entry) and used in the weighted average formulas generating that application´s summary values, which are listed in the statistical ratio columns. These selected N values for total patient studies and total lesions do not appear in the individual spreadsheets but are embedded in the formulas and appear with the application´s summary values in the overall summary sheets at the end of this report. Note that a weighted average is used, which weights studies by the number of patients, so that results obtained with more patients are given more credit. If lesion-by-lesion analysis was performed, a separate value for that analysis is also listed.

All tabular matter is presented here in the form in which it was submitted to HCFA, with the exception of various corrections to tabulation errors found in certain spreadsheets and their carryover to the overall summary sheets, and the placement of table numbers according to the style of this journal.