Rich...
Hello again.....When I was dx a second time my breast cancer
surgeon/specialist ordered a Pet Scan to detect anything else that might
be going on. He had already done a biopsy and knew there was cancer
there.
When the Pet Scan results came back he told Gene and I that the ONLY
[sorry for shouting here] area of "uptake" was in the right breast, and
the area he found on ultrasound upon exam before biopsy. I had been
treated for a breast infection [due to old seroma rupturing] just a few
months prior to the recur. [feb/may 02] He started with a needle
aspiration to see if it was perhaps a relapse of the infection. There
were suspicious findings from that so he did a biopsy. ["suspicious for
mammery carcinoma"]
He really wanted to check the lymphnodes that's why the Pet Scan.
Hope this helps you...
Take care there/God bless
annie

Ultimately.....we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a
freedom.

"Courage"...is *fear* that has said it's prayers.

On a Pet Scan...cancer shows up as "red" on the Pet Scan. It did here
anyway.
later
Tc/Gb
annie

Ultimately.....we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a
freedom.

"Courage"...is *fear* that has said it's prayers.

No one method is ideal for -diagnosing- breast cancer.  PET is I think
quite good at imaging a tumour, and can do so with higher resolution
than most other methods, but as I understand it, it also detects a lot
of other things, so it is prone to false positives.

Before committing to surgery one would want to biopsy the mass to
confirm that it is malignant.

Furthermore PET requires administration of an isotope drug, which is
expensive and carries risks of its own, so it is not ideal as a general
screening test.

Tim Jackson

<< Can it detect BC
or not? Or is just less good at it compared to other cancers? >><BR><BR>

The PET scan shows increased uptake in selected areas which could correspond to
b.c. or metastases.  However, there is no test at this point in time which is
100% accurate.  Different scanning techniques appear to have differing degress
of accuracy for picking up potential malignancies in different areas.  The only
way to know for sure if something is/is not malignant is through a biopsy.