Sunday, November 30 | 9:00 a.m.-9:10 a.m. | S1-SSNMMI01-1 | Room S405
In this session, attendees will learn how different chemotherapy regimens affect myocardial accumulation in breast cancer patients, with FDG-PET imaging showing these differences.
Masaki Watanabe from Tokyo Women’s Medical University will discuss these findings on how anthracycline and immune check inhibitors (ICI) lead to significant increases in myocardial uptake after chemotherapy.
“Cardiac accumulation of FDG-PET was underutilized in oncology,” Watanabe and team members wrote. “However, the serial analysis provides clues for detecting cardiotoxicity of chemotherapy.”
For their study, the researchers analyzed 535 FDG-PET examinations performed before and after chemotherapy in 108 women with breast cancer in 2014 and 2025.
They reported an average number of five PET scans per patient and an average observation period of 39 months. The team also obtained 309 pre- and postchemotherapy data sets. Of these, 34 were for anthracyclines (n = 17), 146 were for HER2 inhibitors (n = 40), 20 were for ICI (n = 9), and 109 were for others (n = 54).
The team used the myocardial standard uptake ratio (M-SUR) for the study to measure uptake from the different regimens. It found that postchemotherapy M-SUR was significantly higher than before chemotherapy in the anthracyclines (4.7 vs. 3.2; p < 0.0001) and ICI (5 vs. 3; p=0.0328) groups.
However, M-SUR values were lower after chemotherapy than before treatment for the HER2 inhibitor (4.9 vs. 4.3) and the other groups (4.2 vs. 3.8).
So, how can breast radiologists in the molecular imaging space apply this information? Attend this session to find out more.