The correlation of histopathology and mediastinal lymph node involvement in non-small cell lung cancer patients preoperatively evaluated with PET/CT

Lung cancer is the second most prevalent cancer, however, it is the one associated with the highest rate of cancer-related death. The current treatment modality that extends the survival the most in early stage NSCLC is surgery, nevertheless, accurate staging and appropriate patient selection for surgery is critical for prognosis. International standardization of N staging is essential. PET/CT is frequently used for evaluation of accurate staging, assessment of treatment response and overall prognosis in NSCLC and due to being a non-invasive study that is done in one session, it is being used increasingly more, replacing other options. In this study, PET/CT and pathology reports of NSCLC cases that have been evaluated preoperatively with PET/CT and have been operated on for curative or biopsy purposes were analyzed retrospectively. Size of tumor in PET/CT, pathological subtype of tumor, SUVmax value of tumor, SUV max value and pathological diagnosis of mediastinal and hilar lymph node stations were noted and statistically analyzed. Examining the data, it was found that SUV max value of tumor is significantly different among subtypes and higher SUV max values of mediastinal lymph nodes were associated with higher N staging but PET/CT was unsuccessful in accurately determining N1 status. Keywords: PET/CT, mediastinal staging, non-small cell lung cancer