PET/CT and DWI could play different roles in diagnosing pancreatic carcinoma. Enhanced PET/CT seems to be superior to unenhanced PET/CT. Further larger prospective studies are needed to establish its value for diagnosis in pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death in Western countries with an increasing incidence. The overall survival for patients with pancreatic find more cancer is very poor, with a 5-year survival of 1% to 4%.1 Given its incidence and high mortality, substantially increased research efforts are clearly warranted to understand, detect, and control the disease. In spite of the development of

imaging modalities, the preoperative diagnostics of pancreatic tumors has remained suboptimal, thus restricting the treatment planning of these malignancies. The discrimination between inflammatory processes and malignancies of the pancreas and the assessment of local resectability and distant metastases of the pancreatic cancer remains challenging with different imaging modalities. Over the years, integrated positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT), in which a full-ring detector clinical see more PET scanner

and multidetector row helical CT (MDCT) scanner are combined, has made it possible to acquire both metabolic and anatomic imaging data using a single device in a single diagnostic session and provides precise anatomic localization of suspicious areas of increased fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) uptake and

rules out false-positive PET findings.2,3 Tang et al.4 did a meta-analysis about the detection of pancreatic malignancy with PET/CT. They found that the pooled sensitivity and specificity estimate for PET/CT were 90.1% and 80.1%. Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique based old on the imaging of the molecular mobility of water. During recent years, DWI of diseases of pelvic, for example, prostate,5 urinary bladder,6 uterus7 and rectum,8 has presented promising results. DWI of the upper abdomen has been a technical challenge due to respiration, bowel peristalsis, blood flow and long acquisition times. The implementation of ultrafast imaging techniques, such as parallel imaging, has made DWI of the upper abdomen a feasible option and has been found to be useful in differentiation of malignant from benign liver lesions.9,10 Recently, studies have reported the diagnostic performance of DWI in discrimination of pancreatic lesions, but the diagnostic value of DWI for pancreas has not yet been defined. Since PET/CT is highly sensitive and DWI is highly specific, it implies PET/CT and DWI could play different roles during different conditions in diagnosing pancreatic cancer.