The comparison of diagnostic ability between half time bone scan image via Bone evolution software by GE: NM 670 with standard image

Abstract

A bone scan is a diagnosis of bone abnormalities which are important in the examination of patients with various types of cancer to find the spread of cancer to the bone. The bone scan took a long time for the patient to be examined. Therefore, software was invented to reduce the time of bone scan examination while maintaining normal scan image quality. There is software called “Bone evolution” of GE machines that can scan bone scans in half of the normal time or inject only half of the normal dose of radiopharmaceuticals, and produce image quality as same as normal one did. To determine whether a bone scan image at half of the time of a normal scan using the Bone evolution software of a GE NM670 can diagnose lesions not different from a normal scan. A randomized controlled trial in patients undergoing bone scans for metastasis at the nuclear medicine department, Lopburi Cancer Hospital. A total of 84 patients were selected between September 2018-October 2019 to compare the number of lesions, lesion locations, and image quality, which was categorized as good, medium, and poor between the two scanned images. The data were analyzed by computer program SPSS using basic statistics namely, percentage, mean, and standard deviation. To compare the data of 2 groups, wilcoxon match Paired sign rank test was utilized. The number of lesions from the normal scans was greater than the half-time scans without a statistically significant difference (P<0.001). The number of lesion locations from the normal scans was less than the half-time scans with a statistically significant difference (P<0.001). The image quality of the normal scan was better than that of the half-time scan with a statistically significant difference (P<0.001).Normal scans ensure better diagnosis for doctors. Consequently, half-time scans programmed with Bone evolution could not be substituted for normal scans.