Effectiveness of ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT in the diagnosis and staging of osteosarcoma: a meta-analysis of 26 studies

Background: Multiple trials have attempted to assess the diagnostic value of ¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography (¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT) in osteosarcoma with results remaining inconclusive. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of ¹⁸F-FDG PET and PET/CT in the diagnosis, staging, recurrence and metastasis formation observations of osteosarcoma through systematic review followed by meta-analysis.

Methods: Three electronic databases, Medline/PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane Library were utilized in this study. Eligible studies that assessed the performance of ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT for the diagnosis, staging, restaging and recurrence monitoring of osteosarcoma were retrieved utilizing specific search criteria. After screening and diluting out the non-conforming articles, all relevant articles and their data were identified and extracted to calculate the summary metrics involving sensitivity, specificity, diagnostic odd ratio (DOR), and area under the curve (AUC) to determine the effectiveness of ¹⁸F-FDG PET in diagnosing osteosarcoma clinically.

Results: Out of 1976 articles searched, twenty-six studies were identified that were viable. All data from these articles, utilized in the quantitative analyses, showed after meta-analysis that when utilizing ¹⁸F-FDG PET or PET/CT it was better with a success rate of 90-100% for detecting primary lesions and distant metastases of patients with osteosarcoma. Similar results were also obtained for detecting lung and bone metastases in a subgroup analysis.

Conclusions: As such the investigation demonstrated that ¹⁸F-FDG PET and PET/CT are very accurate for the diagnosis, staging and recurrence monitoring of osteosarcoma. ¹⁸F-FDG-avid lesions should be further examined in osteosarcoma, especially for suspicious lung lesions.