OBJECTIVE: The purpose of our study is to improve radiologists understanding of the clinical issues involved in making a diagnosis and to guide further diagnostic workup and treatment of solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs).
CONCLUSION: Information on the morphologic and hemodynamic characteristics of SPNs provided by dynamic helical CT, with high specificity and reasonably high accuracy, can be used for initial assessment. PET/CT is more sensitive at detecting malignancy than dynamic helical CT, and all malignant nodules may be potentially diagnosed as malignant by both techniques. Therefore, PET/CT may be selectively performed to characterize SPNs that show indeterminate results at dynamic helical CT.