Influence of Four Radiotracers in PET/CT on Diagnostic Accuracy for Prostate Cancer: A Bivariate Random-Effects Meta-Analysis.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: To date, several positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) radiotracers including fluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG), carbon-11 labeled choline (11C-choline), 18-F fluorocholine (18F-FCH) and carbon-11 acetate (11C-acetate) have already been assessed in the application of prostate cancer (PCa) diagnosis to some extent, the diagnostic efficiency of these radiotracers still remain controversial. As a result of this, we carried out this meta-analysis for the purpose of comparing the diagnostic accuracy among four PET/CT radiotracers.

METHODS: A systematical literature search for articles was performed until July 3, 2015. We implemented all analysis using the statistical software of STATA12 and quality assessment was performed using QUADAS-2.

RESULTS: A total of 56 studies containing 3,586 patients were included in this meta-analysis. Parameter estimates of the overall analysis are as follows: sensitivity, 0.80 (95% CI: 0.74-0.85); specificity, 0.84 (95% CI: 0.77-0.89) and area under roc curve-AUC of SROC, 0.89 (95% CI: 0.86-0.91), indicating a relatively high level of accuracy in diagnosis of PCa. When different radiotracers of PET/CT were compared, 18F-FCH-PET/CT was ranked as the most favorable with the highest value of AUC (AUC = 0.94; 95% CI: 0.92-0.96) whereas 18F-FDG was the least favorable (AUC = 0.73, 95% CI: 0.69-0.77).

CONCLUSION: This study suggested that PET/CT imaging plays an invaluable role in the diagnosis of PCa and 18F-FCH-PET/CT was considered as a superior diagnostic tool over other radiotracers. More attention should be paid to the diagnostic efficiency of the four radiotracers particularly for PCa patients with different clinical stages.