Fig. 4

A female patient 72 years old presented with hemoptysis and proven histopathologically to have NSCLC. CT study reveals a malignant mass lesion involving the right lower lobe measuring 34.5 × 27.3 mm staged as T2 (a) with sub-centimetric right para-tracheal lymphadenopathy considered to be nonspecific and staged as N0 (c). Her PET/CT revealed right lobe mass lesion measuring 25.6 × 17 mm in average staged as T1 with a downgrade of the CT-T staging separating the actual tumoral tissue from the surrounding pulmonary non-malignant changes with positive activity detected at the right para-tracheal lymphadenopathy staged as N1 instead of N0 diagnosed by CT (b, d). The surgical staging of the patients by PET/CT changed from IA to IIB