الفهرس 
Anatomy of the BreastOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Breast cancer is the most common non-skin cancer and
the second leading cause of cancer related death in
women. Breast cancer strikes women of all ages, races,
ethnicities, socioeconomic strata, and geographic locales.
Once breast cancer is diagnosed, the tumor stage has to be
accurately determined before therapy chosen and the
prognosis known.
Cancer staging is essential in determining the choice of
therapy, as well as a patient’s prognosis and chances for
survival.
Conventional imaging cannot precisely detect axillary
lymph node involvement and/or the presence of distant
metastases, which significantly change therapeutic management
of these patients. Whole-body 18F-FDG PET/CT has proven to
be an effective imaging modality for staging of malignant
tumors.
Combined 18-FDG PET/CT provides the ability to
combine functional and morphologic information in a single
study, thus becoming a powerful imaging modality for
diagnosis & staging of breast cancer.
Our data are in agreement with the previous studies
has demonstrated that PET/CT is the technique of choice and indispensable tool for evaluation of the patients with breast
cancer.
Combined PET/CT has proved its effectiveness that
outweighs the other methods in the staging of the disease.
The use of combined PET/CT in patients with breast cancer
improves the sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of local
extent of the disease, axillary and extra-axillary lymph nodes
involvement as well as detection of the distant metastasis
compared to CT alone.
The use of diagnostic contrast enhanced CT with
PET/CT helps in better anatomical localization and in
addition it constitute a base line exam for staging and follow
up if PET/CT is not affordable and only CT will be used..