الفهرس 
Normal Breast AnatomyOnly 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 and 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, in one setting
examination.
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.
In conclusion, our study results show that combined
PET/CT is a single valuable tool provides whole-body
overview evaluation of recently diagnosed breast cancer
patients, providing valuable information on axillary and
extra-axillary lymph node involvement as well as distant
metastases. PET/CT proved to be an efficient, accurate and
non-invasive imaging technique in detecting metastatic
disease with subsequent modification of the initial patient
staging.