Diagnostic performance of 18FFET PET in newly diagnosed cerebral lesions

Abstract O-(2-¹⁸FFluoroethyl)-L-tyrosine (¹⁸FFET) PET is a valuable tool for the initial assessment of newly developed cerebral lesions, offering diagnostic and grading information for brain neoplasms. We aim to investigate clues for initial differential diagnosis in patients with newly developed cerebral lesions. We retrospectively analyzed 57 patients who underwent ¹⁸FFET PET to evaluate newly diagnosed brain lesions. Tumor-to-brain ratios (TBRmax and TBRmean) of ¹⁸FFET uptake were assessed to differentiate brain neoplastic lesions (BNLs) from non-neoplastic lesions (NNLs), and between tumor subgroups. ¹⁸FFET uptake was significantly higher in BNLs compared to NNLs (TBRmax: 3.82 ± 1.41 vs 2.36 ± 0.60, P PP < 0.001), with a cutoff of 2.82 (sensitivity: 85.7%, specificity: 88.9%, AUC: 0.887, 95% CI: 0.779–0.996). ¹⁸FFET PET uptake provides important diagnostic information for differentiating brain neoplasms from non-neoplastic lesions and helps stratify tumor grades at initial presentation.