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‹ Thu · 30 Apr 2026
Near-term implementable finding

CXCR4-targeted PET/CT with [¹⁸F]AlF-NOTA-QHY-04 in primary central nervous system lymphoma: a prospective comparison with MRI and [¹⁸F]FDG PET/CT

A new brain-imaging agent detects lymphoma as well as MRI but beats standard PET scans, offering doctors another tool to catch disease recurrence.

A prospective study of 29 PCNSL patients demonstrates that the novel CXCR4-targeted PET agent [¹⁸F]AlF-NOTA-QHY-04 achieves diagnostic accuracy comparable to MRI while dramatically outperforming FDG-PET, offering a potentially valuable non-invasive imaging option for PCNSL diagnosis and restaging. The very high tumor-to-background ratio suggests superior lesion detection, particularly relevant for recurrence assessment where MRI can be confounded by treatment changes.

What the study was

Study design
Prospective comparative diagnostic study
Population
Patients with suspected primary CNS lymphoma (initial diagnosis and suspected recurrence)
Sample size
29
Category
Diagnostics
Maturity
Validated
Journal
European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging

Why it surfaced

Prospective validation of novel CXCR4-targeted PET agent with AUC=0.979 in PCNSL, significantly outperforming FDG-PET; directly relevant to lymphoma diagnosis and restaging workflow.

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