Comparison of whole-body MRI and skeletal scintigraphy for detection of bone metastatic tumors: A meta-analysis

PurposeWe performed a meta-analysis to investigate and compare diagnostic performance of whole-body MRI and skeletal scintigraphy for detection of bone metastatic tumors.Materials and methodsPubMed and Embase were searched for relevant articles. We calculated sensitivities, specificities, diagnostic odds ratios (DOR), positive likelihood ratios (PLR), negative likelihood ratios (NLR), and constructed summary receiver operating characteristic curves using bivariate models for whole-body MRI and skeletal scintigraphy, respectively.ResultsAcross 7 studies (332 patients), whole-body MRI have similar patient-based sensitivity (0.84 vs 0.83), specificity (0.96 vs 0.94), DOR (137.0 vs 70.2), PLR (23.3 vs 13.0) and NLR (0.17 vs 0.19) with skeletal scintigraphy. Area under curves for whole-body MRI and skeletal scintigraphy was 0.94 and 0.89, respectively.ConclusionBoth whole-body MRI and skeletal scintigraphy have good diagnostic performance for detecting bone metastatic tumors. It remains inconclusive whether whole-body MRI or bone scintigraphy is superior in detecting bone metastatic tumors.