Abstract
Ovarian cancer (OC) was most often diagnosed at an advanced stage due to poor symptoms, the lack of an effective screening method and the limitations of examinations for the early detection of the disease. Sadly, the surgical approach is not possible for all patients, therefore the neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) was a good standard approach before the complete cytoreduction. Currently we don't have indisputable and definitive directives about tools to predict the anatomopathological response. This study investigates the potential of 18FDG-PET in predicting the histological response in high grade epithelial OC before NACT treatment. Ten advanced primarily inoperable OC patients treated with NACT were recruited into this prospective study, then 4 patients could be eligible to analyze, with 12 target lesions eligible to comparative analyses with 18FDG-PET against histological analyses. All patients after NACT presented clinical and biological responses, with normalization of CA 125. Four patients, with 12 resections specimens identified to corresponding 18F-FDG-PET/CT imagery, had showed concordant aspects of response. This preliminary study has demonstrated the role in predictive response of 18FDG-PET, but the complexity in comparative analyses of morpho-functional imagery and histological study includes many difficulties. Thus, to obtain statistically robust results, a large-scale study must be conducted, based on these very encouraging results.