Consensus recommendations for the use of 18F-FDG PET as an indicator of therapeutic response in patients in National Cancer Institute Trials.

Many therapeutic clinical trials have proposed using a measure of metabolic change to assess therapeutic response rather than relying on conventional anatomic measurements of changes in tumor size on CT or MRI. PET assessment of changes in 18F-FDG uptake by tumors is gaining accep-tance as such a measure. Despite the increasing use of 18F-FDG PET as a bio-marker for predicting therapeutic response, there are no widely accepted standardized protocols for using 18F-FDG PET as a tool for assessing response to therapy, nor are there validated criteria for judging response using 18F-FDG PET. The European PET community, working with the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Can-cer, initiated a project…