Utility of fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography in patients with fever of unknown origin diagnosed as lymphoma

Objective: To assess the efficacy of fluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (18F-FDG PET)/computed tomography (CT) in the diagnosis of patients with fever of unknown origin (FUO), who were finally diagnosed as lymphoma. Subjects and Methods: A retrospective study was performed in the First Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine of Zhejiang University, China, from March 2009 to March 2012. The PET/CT images of consecutive patients with FUO were analyzed. Within 1 week of PET/CT scanning, additional histological tests were also performed if clinically needed. Results: A total of 73 consecutive patients were included. Of these, 34 (47%) had a PET/CT finding suggestive of the presence of lymphoma and 29 (85%) had a diagnosis of confirmed lymphoma; 39 (53%) had a PET/CT result revealing the absence of lymphoma and 4 (10%) were diagnosed by biopsy as having lymphoma, . The most frequent lymphoma diagnosis was peripheral T cell lymphoma (n = 16; 55%), followed by diffuse large B cell lymphoma (n = 9; 31%). The accuracy of PET/CT was 88%. Conclusion: In this study, PET/CT had high diagnostic accuracy in patients with FUO resulting from lymphoma, which indicated that PET/CT scanning was a valuable diagnostic tool for these groups of patients with FUO.