J Cancer 2017; 8(7):1238-1248. doi:10.7150/jca.18361 This issue Cite
Research Paper
1. Department of Radiation Oncology, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, State Key Laboratory of Oncology in South China, Collaborative Innovation Center for Cancer Medicine, Canton, China;
2. Department of Nuclear Medicine, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, State Key Laboratory of Oncology in South China, Collaborative Innovation Center for Cancer Medicine, Canton, China;
3. Department of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Sun Yat-sen University, Canton, China.
* Cheng Xu, Yuan Zhang, and Liang Peng contributed equally to this work.
Purpose: To compare the diagnostic performance of two modalities commonly used for detecting distant metastasis in primary nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC): 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG) positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) and conventional work-ups (CWUs).
Methods: All topic-related studies were comprehensively searched and included. We determined sensitivities and specificities across studies, calculated negative and positive likelihood ratios (LR- and LR+, respectively), and constructed summary receiver operating characteristic curves. Moreover, we compared the diagnostic performance of PET/CT and CWUs by analyzing studies that reported the results of these diagnostic methods on the same patients.
Results: The pooled sensitivity and specificity were 85.7% and 98.1% for PET/CT (1474 patients), and 38.0% and 97.6% for CWUs (1329 patients). In the head-to-head comparison of PET/CT and CWUs (1029 patients), PET/CT showed a significantly higher sensitivity (83.7% vs. 40.1%, P < 0.001) and lower LR- (0.169 vs. 0.633, P < 0.001) than CWUs on a per-patient basis; no significant difference was observed in pooled specificity (97.7% vs. 97.8%, P = 0.892) or LR+ (36.416 vs. 16.845, P = 0.149). The superiority of PET/CT over CWUs was due mainly to the better diagnostic performance on bone metastasis. However, suboptimal sensitivity of PET/CT was reported in the aspect of detection of liver metastasis. Sensitivity analyses showed relatively poor sensitivity and LR- of PET/CT compared to the original analysis.
Conclusions: PET/CT was superior to CWUs in detecting distant metastasis in primary NPC. However, the efficacy of PET/CT in detecting liver metastasis still requires further optimization.
Keywords: Positron emission tomography/computed tomography, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, distant metastasis, diagnosis, meta-analysis.