Radioguided surgery with 68Ga-DOTATATE for patients with neuroendocrine tumors

Targeted precision neuroendocrine neoplasms (NEN) surgery may represent an innovative, yet promising, development of surgical procedures to achieve a radical resection of the primary tumour (by intra-operative confirmation of tumour-free margins) and to improve the identification of small sized lesions (that might otherwise be missed by either pre-operative functional imaging, ultrasound or manual palpation during surgery). From a practical point of view, radioguided surgery (RGS) requires a close collaboration between the nuclear medicine and the surgical teams, so that a small amount of radiopharmaceutical is intravenously injected in the patient right before surgery. The tumour lesions’ emitted radiation is then detected by a hand-held probe by the surgeon intra-operatively.