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A head-to-head comparison of 68Ga-DOTA-FAPI-04 and 18F-FDG PET/MR in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma: a prospective study

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Abstract

Purpose

To conduct a head-to-head comparison of the diagnostic ability of 68Ga-DOTA-FAPI-04 (68Ga-FAPI) and 18F-FDG PET/MR in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients.

Methods

Patients diagnosed with NPC were prospectively enrolled. All patients underwent head-and-neck 68Ga-FAPI PET/MR and 18F-FDG PET/MR within 1 week. Primary tumor, lymph node numbers, and tracer uptake were compared by SUVmax and visual evaluation. The primary tumor volumes derived from 68Ga-FAPI, 18F-FDG PET, and MRI were also compared.

Results

Fifteen patients were enrolled from June to August 2020. Both 68Ga-FAPI and 18F-FDG PET had 100% detection rate of the primary tumor. The 68Ga-FAPI SUVmax of primary tumors (13.87 ± 5.13) was lower than that of 18F-FDG (17.73 ± 6.84), but the difference was not significant (p = 0.078). Compared with 18F-FDG, 68Ga-FAPI PET improved the delineation of skull-base invasion in eight out of eight patients and intracranial invasion in four out of four patients. When 25%SUVmax of 68Ga-FAPI or 20%SUVmax of 18F-FDG was utilized as a threshold for determining tumor volume, it was highly consistent with MRI. 18F-FDG PET detected much more positive lymph nodes than 68Ga-FAPI (100 vs 48). The SUVmax of 48 paired lymph nodes was significantly lower on 68Ga-FAPI than 18F-FDG (8.67 ± 3.88 vs 11.79 ± 6.17, p < 0.001). Additionally, 68Ga-FAPI further detected four highly suspected small, distant metastases in three patients. Compared with 18F-FDG, 68Ga-FAPI changed overall staging in six of fifteen patients, with three patients being up-staged, and three down-staged.

Conclusion

68Ga-FAPI outperforms 18F-FDG in delineating the primary tumor and detecting suspected distant metastases, particularly in the evaluation of skull-base and intracranial invasion, suggesting 68Ga-FAPI hybrid PET/MR has the potential to serve as a single-step staging modality for patients with NPC. However, its value regarding lymph node and distant metastases evaluation needs further study.

Trial registration

NCT04554719. Registered September 8, 2020 - retrospectively registered, http://clinicaltrails.gov/show/NCT04554719

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Data availability

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Code availability

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Funding

This work was supported in part by the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81630049, 82030052), and National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2019 YFC 1316204).

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Author notes

  1. Chunxia Qin and Fang Liu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Nuclear Medicine, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, No. 1277 Jiefang Ave, Wuhan, 430022, China

    Chunxia Qin, Fang Liu, Weiwei Ruan, Qingyao Liu, Yongkang Gai, Fan Hu, Dawei Jiang & Xiaoli Lan

  2. Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging, Wuhan, 430022, China

    Chunxia Qin, Fang Liu, Weiwei Ruan, Qingyao Liu, Yongkang Gai, Fan Hu, Dawei Jiang & Xiaoli Lan

  3. Cancer Center, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430022, China

    Jing Huang & Kunyu Yang

  4. Institute of Haematology, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430022, China

    Yu Hu

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  1. Chunxia Qin
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Kunyu Yang or Xiaoli Lan.

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Ethics approval

This article does not contain any experiments with animals. All procedures involving human participants were carried out in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This study was approved by the Clinical Research Ethics Committee of Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (NO. 20200290).

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in this study.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Oncology - Head and Neck

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Qin, C., Liu, F., Huang, J. et al. A head-to-head comparison of 68Ga-DOTA-FAPI-04 and 18F-FDG PET/MR in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma: a prospective study. Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging 48, 3228–3237 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-021-05255-w

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