PET/CT and Sentinel Node in Oral Cancer (PETNode)

These patients are normally preoperatively sent to a CT scan of the thorax and abdomen; in this study, this CT is replaced by a wholebody PET/CT scan. Afterwards, the patients goes to sentinel node lymphoscintigraphy and then to operation.

By combining biomarkers and molecular imaging in patients with a clinically T1/T2N0M0 oral cancer, we want to characterize the tumor physiologically and correlate these physiological features to the clinical appearance of the cancer.

Aims of the study:

• can PET/CT in this patient group metastases with consequently change of treatment?
• can fusion of SPECT/CT and PET/CT with calculation of standardized uptake value (SUV) indicate, how much tumor tissue there should be in a positive sentinel node to be detected by PET?
• can dual-time PET scanning better determine lymph node metastases, than single-time PET scanning?
• correlation between SUV in PET with molecular-biological findings both in the primary tumor and in metastases