Publications by authors named "Nicola Pisu"
Background: When faced with a painful knee replacement, ruling out infection is mandatory to set the correct therapeutic approach. However, it is not always easy, especially in subclinical/chronic infections. A multidisciplinary approach is necessary to assess in the most correct way each case of suspected periprosthetic knee joint infection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA 76-year-old man, who experienced prostate cancer biochemical relapse after 12 years from radical prostatectomy, underwent abdominal CT scan for restaging purposes, negative for metastases, and then C-choline PET/CT. The only finding was an area of focal uptake of radiotracer between the intestinal loops and the abdominal wall; after resection, the lesion demonstrated to be a metastasis from hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), for which the patient had undergone liver resection 2 years earlier. This case proves that abnormal foci of C-choline uptake in the peritoneum in HCC patients have to be kept in mind as possible sites of HCC-metastases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Pinhole SPECT (P-SPECT) has proven to be a high-resolution and sensitive method in both experimental and clinical studies. In this study, we investigated whether P-SPECT combined with conventional planar scintigraphy can give additional information in hyperfunctioning parathyroid gland detection in both primary hyperparathyroidism (pHPT) and secondary hyperparathyroidism (sHPT) since planar imaging has proved partially limited, especially in sHPT.
Methods: We studied 110 consecutive patients with HPT, selecting 67 patients who underwent neck surgery and had definitive histology: 48 with pHPT and 19 with sHPT.
To investigate somatostatin receptor scintigraphy (SRS) usefulness compared to conventional imaging procedures (CIP) in non-functioning gastroenteropatic (GEP) neuroendocrine tumors, we studied 40 patients, 30 in follow-up (FU) after previous operation for primary tumor (27 cases) or non-operable for disseminated metastases (3 cases), and 10 in the phase of initial diagnosis and staging (IDS). All patients were asymptomatic for hormone overexpression, with slightly high serum chromogranine A in 6 FU. The definitive diagnosis was obtained by surgery, laparotomy or percutaneous CT/US guided biopsy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: In this study the usefulness of parathyroid scintigraphy was evaluated in a group of patients affected by secondary hyperparathyroidism, combining the conventional double-tracer subtraction planar scintigraphy with pinhole-SPECT (P-SPECT) acquisition and comparing the scintigraphic data with those obtained by ultrasonography.
Materials And Methods: Twenty-four patients with secondary hyperparathyroidism were enrolled, 19 with chronic renal failure on haemodialysis and 5 with renal transplant. All patients underwent parathyroidectomy because of their unresponsiveness to medical therapy and/or severe osteodystrophy.
Unlabelled: In patients with gastroenteropancreatic (GEP) neuroendocrine tumors, we investigated the usefulness of somatostatin receptor scintigraphy (SRS) in the detection of liver metastasis, which represents the most important prognostic factor in these tumors, and in the management of affected patients.
Methods: We enrolled 149 patients with GEP tumors, 69 during initial staging and 80 in follow-up. All patients underwent whole-body scanning at 4 and 24 h, followed by abdominal planar and SPECT imaging after intravenous injection of 250 MBq (111)In-pentetreotide.