Pilot Viability of 11C-MET-PET as a Post-surgery Baseline Scan in High-grade Gliomas

The tracer 11C-methionine (11 C-MET) is used as a specific cell proliferation tracer which shows metabolically active tumordeposities. A healthy brain barely takes up 11C-MET, causing the difference between the background and the tumor to be realively high. In addition, there is relatively little 11C-MET uptake in inflammatory processes. This makes 11C-MET a very suitable positron emission tomography (PET) tracer in order to differentiate between tumor progression and therapy changes. The latter is a major clinical problem for which further investigation is necessary. In order to be able to make this differentiation, a direct post-operative baseline scan is required. With regard to the advanced MRI sequences, it is known that it is necessary to produce the post-operative baseline scan within 48 hours. After that timeframe, operation induced changes start to occur, such as granulation tissue. In that case the interpretation of the scan is no longer possible. Immediately postoperatively (\<48 hours) 11C-MET has never been used before. Therefore, it is unknown whether 11C-MET provides a good baseline scan directly after surgery. This pilot will investigate the feasibility of this 11C-MET baseline scan and comparison the results with the advanced MRI sequences.