Research progress of correlation between ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT metabolic parameters and pathological types of non-small cell lung cancer

Lung cancer is a malignant tumor that seriously threatens human life and health, and its pathological type affects the treatment plan and prognosis. Although great progress has been made in the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer, there are still a considerable number of patients whose histopathological type or subtype cannot be defined due to some special circumstances. ¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET/CT, as a new non-invasive imaging technique, can directly reflect the degree of tumor metabolism, and its metabolic parameters have a certain correlation with the pathological types of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Radiomics is a developing discipline, which aims to obtain automated quantitative imaging functions from medical images and be able to predict the pathological type of lung cancer non-invasively. This paper reviews the application and progress of ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT in predicting the pathological types of NSCLC.