Hanna Rafaela Ferreira Dalla Pria, Otavio Augusto Ferreira Dalla Pria, Jitesh Ahuja, Rishi Agrawal, Chad D Strange, Melissa C Price, Mylene T Truong
Radiol Clin North Am. 2025 Jul;63(4):553-563. doi: 10.1016/j.rcl.2024.12.011. Epub 2025 Jan 18.
In PET/CT evaluation of thoracic malignancies, knowledge of common pitfalls and artifacts that can mimic pathology is important to avoid misinterpretation. These pitfalls include physiologic uptake in striated muscle or brown fat, malignancies that are not [18F]-fluoro-2-deoxy-d-glucose (FDG) avid, and FDG avid benign processes. Artifacts include misregistration of PET and CT images due to cardiac or respiratory motion, and high attenuation materials on CT. Specific protocols for patient preparation and imaging acquisition, review of both the attenuation-corrected and nonattenuation-corrected PET images, and correlation with clinical history can help to improve diagnostic accuracy of PET/CT.