Objective: Evaluate the role of 18F-FDG PET/CT in detecting recurrent breast cancer lesions and the relationship with clinical and paraclinical characteristics.

Subjects and methods: cross-sectional descriptive study on 32 patients at K hospital, whose breast cancer recurrence was determined based on pathology results and 18F-FDG PET/CT scan for assessment.

Results: The average age of the 32 female patients in the study was 53.7 years old (the youngest was 39 years old, the oldest was 74 years old). The most common pathology is invasive tubular carcinoma (accounting for 59.4%). Patients diagnosed with recurrence are often diagnosed with stage II (43.8%) and stage III (34.4%) disease with 56.3% of cases having lymph node metastasis before treatment. The most common locations for recurrence are lymph nodes (53.1%) and chest wall (18.8%). The median time to detect disease recurrence is 25 months. 18F-FDG PET/CT scan accurately diagnosed recurrent disease in 28 cases (sensitivity 87.5%) with an average SUVmax is 10.2 and detected other malignant lesions in 15/28 cases. The SUVmax index was higher in the group of patients with late stage, lymph node metastasis, positive ER receptors, negative PR receptors and positive HER-2. There was no difference in SUVmax index in histopathological groups.

Conclusions: 18F-FDG PET/CT has high sensitivity in detecting recurrent cancer lesions, there are differences in SUVmax index in clinical and paraclinical characteristics in breast cancer. However, the study still has a small sample size and needs to be analyzed on a larger sample size.

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