Dual Point Acquisition in the Interim Pet Scan Performed During ABVD Treatment, in Early-Stage Hodgkin's Lymphoma Patients With Bulky Lesions

The proposed study is an non-interventional survey of a cohort of patients in whom interim PET scan is performed only for prognostic aims.

PET with 18F-FDG is a standard staging procedure for most lymphoma subtypes. Performed early during the therapy for Hodgkin's lymphoma (HL) its results have a high prognostic value and is the main predictor of treatment outcome. From 2006 onward, interim-PET after 2 ABVD courses has been increasingly performed in the daily clinical practice as a routine test for disease prognosis, and now it can be considered as a standard prognostic tool.

The novelty of the study relies on a new method for interim-PET scan execution: a dynamic study, with 2 different time points of image acquisition. This could potentially enable us to discriminate between unspecific, inflammatory DG uptake, from a "true" uptake form persisting viable neoplastic cells. Therefore, the main aim of the study is reducing false positive results in the interim-PET scan interpretation. Since dynamic changes of FDG uptake in Hodgkin's lymphoma are still unknown we propose, in the present study, to assess the by the same acquisition technique the pattern of FDG uptake at baseline in untreated patients affected by this neoplasm.

The Institutions equipped with a Magnetic Resonance scanners and a diffusion weighted imaging analysis technique (DW-MRI), could participate to the DW-MRI sub-study.