Clinical nuclear medicine
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Clinical nuclear medicine · Feb 2016
Case Reports18F-FDG PET/CT Reveals Disease Remission in a Patient With Ipilimumab-Refractory Advanced Melanoma Treated With Pembrolizumab.
Pembrolizumab is an anti-programmed cell death receptor 1 (anti-PD-1) antibody, recently approved for the treatment of ipilimumab-refractory metastatic melanoma. We report on a 49-year-old patient with unresectable metastatic melanoma initially treated with 4 cycles of ipilimumab. Because of demonstration of progressive disease on PET/CT, the patient was enrolled into a clinical trial of pembrolizumab. After completion of 4 cycles of pembrolizumab, the follow-up PET/CT scans performed early after and 7 months after the end of treatment exhibited complete disease remission, reflecting the potential role of the modality in treatment response evaluation of melanoma patients receiving anti-PD-1 therapy.
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Clinical nuclear medicine · Feb 2016
Case Reports18F-FDG PET/CT Brain Imaging on a Patient With Paraneoplastic Opsoclonus-Myoclonus Syndrome Arising out of a Mature Cystic Teratoma.
Opsoclonus-myoclonus syndrome (OMS) is an involuntary multidirectional eye movement accompanied by myoclonic jerks and a subtype of paraneoplastic neurological syndromes. Clinical features of OMS include opsoclonus with myoclonic jerks and cerebellar ataxia. Although there have been a few studies on brain FDG PET in paraneoplastic neurological syndrome associated with some kinds of malignancies such as lung and gastric cancer, brain FDG PET of patients with OMS caused by a mature cystic teratoma has not been reported. Here, we described a case of brain FDG PET/CT studies performed in a woman with OMS provoked from a mature cystic teratoma.
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Clinical nuclear medicine · Feb 2016
Quality and Safety in Health Care, Part VII: Lower Costs and Higher Quality.
The Institute of Medicine report entitled The Health Care Imperative: Lowering Costs and Improving Outcomes discussed numerous ways to decrease costs in the health care system without decreasing quality. The use of evidence-based medicine, eliminating wasteful spending such as needlessly high administrative costs, having more preventive services, having a better reimbursement system that emphasized quality, developing a less fragmented and more efficient medical delivery system, having more transparency for patients on the outcomes of different providers, having greater health care literacy for patients, and eliminating fraud were some of the recommendations. The total savings from eliminating unnecessary health care costs was estimated to be over 3 quarters of a trillion dollars each year.