• Sarah Travers, Kirtan Joshi, Douglas C Miller, Amolak Singh, Ayman Nada, Gregory Biedermann, Joseph P Cousins, and N Scott Litofsky.
• Division of Neurological Surgery, University of Missouri School of Medicine, Columbia, Missouri, USA. Electronic address: traverss@health.missouri.edu.
• World Neurosurg. 2021 Jul 1; 151: e1059-e1068.

BackgroundClinical and/or neuroimaging changes after whole-brain radiation therapy (WBRT) or stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) for metastatic brain tumor(s) present the clinical dilemma of differentiating tumor recurrence from radiation necrosis. Several imaging modalities attempt to answer this clinical question, including magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and positron emission tomography (PET) computed tomography (CT). We evaluated our experience regarding the ability of MRS and PET CT to differentiate tumor recurrence from radiation necrosis in patients who have received WBRT or SRS.MethodsWe retrospectively reviewed records of 242 patients with previous WBRT or SRS to identify those who had MRS and/or PET CT to differentiate tumor recurrence from radiation necrosis. Patients were sorted into true-positive, false-positive, false-negative, and true-negative groups on the basis of imaging interpretation and clinical course combined with surgical pathology results or reaction to nonsurgical treatments including SRS, dexamethasone, or observation. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and accuracy were then calculated.ResultsOf 25 patients presenting such diagnostic questions, 19 were evaluated with MRS and 13 with PET CT. MRS sensitivity was 100%, specificity was 50%, and accuracy was 81.8%, whereas PET CT sensitivity was 36.4%, specificity was 66.7%, and accuracy was 42.9%.ConclusionsMRS has better accuracy than PET CT and a high negative predictive value, therefore making it more useful in distinguishing recurrent tumor from radiation necrosis. We encourage correlation with symptoms at imaging to aid in clinical decision making.Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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