We are always facing global FDG uptake in pediatric patients, is there a solution for this issue?

“Global as in total body vertex to toes? The reason for this is that pediatric malignant disease can often occur distally in children, i.e. below elbows and knees. The time to add on the few bed positions can sometimes make a difference in staging. However, we do routinely decrease our time for bed postion in the head and extremities from torso. We would routinely decrease from 2 min for torso to 1 min for head and extemities without prior knowledge of disease in these areas.

Recently we have had an IAEA publication that does state that in PEDIATRIC LYMPHOMA the incidence of disease that may upstage the patient is low enough to restrict to ‘eyes to thighs” imaging but I caution this is validated currently only for lymphoma.”

Prof. Dr. Helen Nadel
Stanford, USA

Reference : Cerci JJ, Etchebehere EC, Nadel H, Brink A, Bal CS, Rangarajan V, Pfluger T, Kagna O, Alonso O, Begum FK, Mir KB, Magboo VP, Menezes LJ, Paez D, Pascual TN. Is True Whole-Body (18)F-FDG PET/CT Required in Pediatric Lymphoma? An IAEA Multicenter Prospective Study. J Nucl Med. 2019 Aug;60(8):1087-1093. doi: 10.2967/jnumed.118.222299. Epub 2019 Jan 25. PubMed PMID: 30683766.”

Question submitted during the the Conference on Hybrid Imaging Live 2019 regarding Prof. Nadel’s lecture on “Hybrid imaging in paediatric patients”