Abstract
18F-FDG PET plays a major role in the pre-surgical evaluation of medically refractory epilepsy patients. The current standard of care is performing interictal evaluations of glucose metabolism. This is mostly related to the tracer kinetics of 18F-FDG owing to a long uptake phase which would translate into ictal injections having low sensitivities and low specificity and demonstrating not only ictal but post-ictal changes. It has been reported that this limitation can be overcome in some status epilepticus scenarios where prolonged seizures can then correlate better with 18F-FDG uptake kinetics. In these cases, focal visual qualitative hot spots are suggestive of the seizure onset zone (SOZ). However, we note that by using advanced subtraction techniques, the prolonged 18F-FDG uptake phase can be overcome in a variety of other cases as well. This opens the door to a slightly larger set of patients that may benefit from this higher resolution PET method. We present 4 cases where a novel subtraction 18F-FDG PET technique was used and elucidate its impact in these specific cases.
