Comment by sharkweek
5 days ago
I had a CT scan last year for some stomach issues they wanted to look at.
Doctor warned me up front that the odds the images find something that looks weird is high but not to panic because of how many false positives there are when looking inside someone’s body.
While I am happy to report they didn’t find anything serious, I do take slight offense to the following at the top of my results:
Last name, First name: Unremarkable
(Kidding of course but still got a chuckle out of me)
> I do take slight offense to the following at the top of my results:
No offense for me, just confusion. One of the status reports started as follows:
> OptionOfT is a very pleasant 36-year-old gentleman 6 weeks status post left anterior total hip arthroplasty done by Dr. _ on _.
I asked my wife whether I was particularly friendly (I sometimes fail to adjust my demeanor in certain situations).
She said: nah, they write that for everybody.
The bar is really low for patient behavior. Tbh I find anyone not screaming at me to be pleasant in comparison.
Some RIS systems make semi form reports with ‘Dear <referrer> thank you for sending <patient> to see us for their <type of imaging> etc etc.
Then you can just tab from field to field when doing the report.
I had a nurse chart “patient ‘feels like a million bucks’” while I was getting an immunotherapy infusion.
She said “It’s just not often I hear that here.”
2.5 years in of regular PET scans. At this point, I’m almost humored by what gets flagged as suspicious by the radiologist - usually mosquito bites and stomach bugs (kids in daycare means I’m almost always sick). I have a scan Monday and two weeks ago had a re-excision so there’s a two inch gash healing on my back. This week I got three vaccines. And then tonight my toddler bit me hard enough to draw blood. I had asked the oncologist if it made sense to delay the scan because of the re-excision and he said not to worry because he’d know why there’s inflammation in that area. I’m thinking the bite and the shots will probably get flagged too. I just hope I don’t forget any other maladies or mishaps that might get flagged that I can’t explain.
How often are they finding actual positive hits on the PET? If its so unreliably with regards to false positives why do you continue to have PET scans done?
PET Scans feature areas with blood flow so tumors show up as hot spots for follow up. People who are maybe only feeling off or had one confirmed tumor can have a lot of small tumors spread across their body which will show up clearly on a PET scan.
When my brother was at the end of his run fighting cancer he felt a bit under the weather and managed to catch covid so everyone figured he was feeling bad due to that. The PET scan showed he had thousands of small masses converging into the large mass that eventually killed him by cutting off blood flow to his kidneys. His cancer was an aggressive blood cancer that had stood up to conventional and Trial Chemo drugs. There was no way to treat this but other cancers that are less aggressive can be treated at this point and would be treated differently than a single mass.
In a nutshell it’s that level of visibility that makes PET scans worth it.
PET scans are not really unreliable, they’re just very sensitive and lots of anomalies ranging from benign cysts to malignant tumors show up on them. It’s not always possible to differentiate them without other measures like biopsies, so that’s where the false positives come in.
Getting regular scans to track cancer progression is a different matter altogether, since most of the blips can be eliminated over time and there’s a history to compare against.