CT scan weirdness

mazie73

Hi ladies: This has happened twice now: My pelvic / abdominal CT shows bone progression while the chest CT shows smaller or stable tumors / lesions. My MO told me both times that the findings on the abdominal CT are incorrect and the radiologist is mistaking healing bone for progression. (A different radiologist assessed the chest CT.) My MO is going to ask for a correction on the abdominal CT so that it doesn't say there wasinterval progression.

Anyone else had this issue? Even though my MO insists there's no progression, I don't understand how / why the radiologist keeps getting it (apparently) wrong. It's disconcerting.

jillts

Yes, kind of. The results of my recent bone scan and CT scan were not consistent for the same reason. The radiologist who wrote my bone scan report read the CT report first and said "although extensive sclerotic bone metastases are noted on CT, these lesions show no focal uptake on bone scan. Given the lack of focal activity, increasing sclerosis on CT probably reflects healing."

Sclerotic lesions OFTEN represent healing but not always so a lot of times CT reports will say progression because they don't have any additional info. As well, like you said, the reports are written by different people each time so they are not always consistent and do represent opinion instead of just facts, which are very hard to determine with our disease. My onc looked at the pictures and agrees that they look like healing. Did you have a bone scan too? That should show what kind of activity is in the lesions, so maybe that's what your onc is going by. I also read somewhere that sometimes the lesions are so small that they don't even show up until they are healed... and then when they show up as healing they look like progression. Did that make sense? Anyway, hope you got your answers by now.

MinusTwo

Me too - sort of. For 15+ years before I got breast cancer, I had a mammo every year. And every year I was called back for more detail and an ULS because I had very dense & fibercystic breasts. And every year, the radiologist's report mentioned the scar tissue from a previous surgery. Guess what - there had been NO previous surgery. No biopsies, no injuries to the breast, etc. Just very dense breasts & a radiologist who had his own pre-conceptions.