Combined imaging techniques for pancreatic cancer.

Advanced pancreatic cancer has a poor prognosis. Early detection with imaging techniques can, however, improve the outlook for patients who undergo surgical resection, the only potential curative treatment. Individual techniques, however, have poor sensitivity for small masses and cannot easily differentiate tumour tissue from pancreatic masses associated with chronic pancreatitis. We combined biochemical detection on positron emission tomography with the anatomical accuracy of computed tomography and were able to improve accuracy of interpretation of imaging for patients with pancreatic cancer.