Most aggressive lymphomas are sensitive to first-line immunochemotherapy and are in first Complete Remission (CR) with initial therapy. CR significantly decreases the risk of recurrence and increases survival. However, a cure is not guaranteed and approximately one third of lymphoma patients have a relapse disease.~FDG PET/CT is a valuable noninvasive tool in the evaluation of lymphomas, especially to differentiate viable lymphoma and fibrosis or necrosis in residual mass.~The majority of relapses are diagnosed based on clinical symptoms reported by patients. And the role of FDG PET/CT for routine surveillance of patients after treatment is controversial.~However, many medical centers use routine follow-up FDG PET/CT in addition to physical examination and laboratory analysis to detect subclinical relapse.~Thus, we can imagine a good timing to routine FDG PET/CT when the tumor burden is small in the asymptomatic window.~Survival improvement for relapse detected by routine follow-up imaging is not clearly established compared to diagnosis by clinical symptoms.~Several studies tried to assess the value of follow-up FDG PET/CT but population, type, timing and duration of surveillance imaging was very heterogeneous.
In the study, we aimed to characterize the role of FDG PET/CT surveillance at 12 months of malignant lymphoma in asymptomatic patients after a first complete remission and to define a rational follow-up strategy.