18F-FDG PET/CT quantification in head and neck squamous cell cancer: principles, technical issues and clinical applications

18F-FDG PET/CT plays a crucial role in the diagnosis and management of patients with head and neck squamous cell cancer (HNSCC). The major clinical applications of this method include diagnosing an unknown primary tumour, identifying regional lymph node involvement and distant metastases, and providing prognostic information. 18F-FDG PET/CT is also used for precise delineation of the tumour volume for radiation therapy planning and dose painting, and for treatment response monitoring, by detecting residual or recurrent disease. Most of these applications would benefit from a quantitative approach to the disease, but the quantitative capability of 18F-FDG PET/CT is still underused in HNSCC. Innovations in PET/CT technology promise to overcome the issues that until now have hindered the employment of dynamic procedures in clinical practice and have limited “quantification” to the evaluation of standardized uptake values (SUV), de facto a semiquantitative parameter, the limits of which are well known to the nuclear medicine community. In this paper the principles of quantitative imaging and the related technical issues are reviewed so that professionals involved in HNSCC management can reflect on the advantages of “true” quantification. A discussion is then presented on how semiquantitative information is currently used in clinical 18F-FDG PET/CT applications in HNSCC, by discussing the improvements that could be obtained with more advanced and “personalized” quantification techniques.