Guidelines on nuclear medicine imaging in neuroblastoma.

Nuclear medicine has a central role in the diagnosis, staging, response assessment and long-term follow-up of neuroblastoma, the most common solid extracranial tumour in children. These EANM guidelines include updated information on I-mIBG, the most common study in nuclear medicine for the evaluation of neuroblastoma, and on PET/CT imaging with F-FDG, F-DOPA and Ga-DOTA peptides. These PET/CT studies are increasingly employed in clinical practice.

I-mIBG scintigraphy in neuroblastoma: development of a SIOPEN semi-quantitative reporting ,method by an international panel.

Purpose: A robust method is required to standardise objective reporting of diagnostic I-mIBG images in neuroblastoma. Prerequisites for an appropriate system are low inter- and intra-observer error and reproducibility across a broad disease spectrum. We present a new reporting method, developed and tested for SIOPEN by an international expert panel.

Skeletal involvement in infants with neuroblastoma a quality control attempt.

Aims And Background: In 1994, French authors hypothesized that positive skeletal mlBG spots in infants with stage 4 neuroblastoma were not prognostically unfavorable unless associated to abnormal standard X-ray or CT findings. In 1999, the European Infant Neuroblastoma Study adopted this definition, indeed reducing the number of patients candidate to chemotherapy. Such an approach requires high quality scans and standardized procedures.