3 '-Deoxy-3 '- 18 F-fluorothymidine positron emission tomography as an early predictor of disease progression in patients with advanced and metastatic pancreatic cancer

Purpose 3′-Deoxy-3′-18F-fluorothymidine (FLT) positron emission tomography (PET) has limited utility in abdominal imaging due to high physiological hepatic uptake of tracer. We evaluated FLT PET/CT combined with a temporal-intensity information-based voxel-clustering approach termed kinetic spatial filtering (FLT PET/CTKSF) for early prediction of response and survival outcomes in locally advanced and metastatic pancreatic cancer patients receiving gemcitabine-based chemotherapy.