Chetan

My personal experience with PETscans is that they miss real oral cancer (false negatives) and show oral cancer where there is none (false positives). The actual numbers are hard to ascertain since radiologists don't follow up with the doctors to gather statistics plus doctors don't gather or report them to anybody. They are especially unreliable for head and neck cancers.
It's for that reason that NCCN guidelines do not include PET scans as part of routine staging, and many institutions use MRI or ultrasound guided biopsies rather than PET scans. The Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG) utilizes the clinical exam, chest x-ray, and pre-treatment CT scan as their standard workup but not Petscans
However a recent retroscpective study shows Petscans may be very good for lymph node cancer detection and have the potential to significantly reduce unnecessary neck dissections
Charm