Chuanhua LI, Hong WU, Qiu QIN, Juan SU, Xianglian HUANG, Yinguang LIN
Objective To explore the metabolic parameters of 18F-FDG PET/CT in lung cancer, and analyze their differences and correlations with various histologic types, different histologic grades, and Ki-67 indices. Methods A retrospective analysis was conducted on the clinical data of 178 lung cancer patients (119 males and 59 females, 35-79 years old) who underwent 18F-FDG PET/CT examinations prior to surgical resection or pathological biopsy at our institution from January 2022 to October 2024. The SUVmax, SUVmean, MTV and TLG were extracted from the imaging data. One-way analysis of variance was used to assess the differences in metabolic parameters across different pathological types and differentiation grades, while Spearman rank correlation analysis was employed to evaluate the correlation between metabolic parameters and the Ki-67 index. Results Significant differences in SUVmax, SUVmean, MTV, TLG, and Ki-67 index were observed among squamous cell carcinoma, adenocarcinoma, and small cell lung cancer (P<0.001). Small cell lung cancer exhibited the highest values for these parameters, followed by squamous cell carcinoma. In overall analysis, SUVmax, SUVmean, MTV, TLG, and Ki-67 in lung cancer all exhibited moderate to strong positive correlations (P<0.05). Among them, SUVmax had the strongest positive correlation with Ki-67 (r=0.522, P<0.05), followed by TLG (r=0.520, P<0.05). According to lung cancer subtypes,adenocarcinoma's SUVmax, SUVmean, MTV and TLG demonstrated varying degrees of significant positive correlation with the Ki-67 index (P<0.001), with correlation coefficients (r) of 0.460, 0.414, 0.396, 0.408, respectively, where SUVmax showed the strongest correlation, followed by SUVmean. In contrast, the metabolic parameters in squamous cell carcinoma and small cell carcinoma do not show a significant correlation with Ki-67 (P>0.05). The Ki-67 index in squamous cell carcinoma revealed significant differences among different differentiation grades (P<0.05), while no significant differences were noted for SUVmax, SUVmean, MTV and TLG (P>0.05). In adenocarcinoma, significant differences were found in SUVmax, SUVmean and Ki-67 index across various differentiation grades (P<0.05), whereas MTV and TLG showed no significant differences (P>0.05). Conclusion There were significant differences in 18F-FDG PET/CT metabolic parameters and Ki-67 among different pathological types of lung cancer, and there was a certain correlation between metabolic parameters and Ki-67. Significant differences in Ki-67 were observed between squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma. Additionally, the SUVmax and SUVmean of adenocarcinoma showed significant variations across different differentiation levels.