SUV: Standard Uptake or Silly Useless Value?

Quantification has always held a pervasive allure for nuclear medicine. There is a sense that anything that can be quantified should be. Once we have the numbers in hand, there is a mysterious tendency to accord them special value. Why this should be the case is unclear. Perhaps it is because of the functional nature of nuclear medicine studies, which seem as if they should be quantified. Perhaps it is because it is so easy to extract numbers from our studies. Whatever the cause, the phenomenon has been particularly strong in PET, in which we hear at every turn that PET is {open_quotes}quantitative.{close_quotes} DiChiro and Brooks commented on this phenomenon years ago, noting that, in many applications, subjective interpretation of PET images is actually superior to the use of quantitative data. Undaunted, however, the field has continued to lean heavily toward numbers as the final arbiter of correctness. 15 refs., 2 tabs.