Impact of PET Scan on the Curative Strategy of Colo-rectal Cancers : A Randomized Study

The risk of recurrence in stage III and IV of colorectal cancers (CRC) is high during the three years following the tumoral resection with curative aim. Therefore, a prolonged follow-up and an intense monitoring are recommended to detect these recurrences precociously. Nevertheless, current consensual morphological and biological examinations are not very contributory, of difficult interpretation and expensive. The metabolic imagery in tomoscintigraphy by emission of positron coupled with the scanner, called PET-TDM, allows to identify more specifically recurrences, analyzes the whole body, detects hepatic metastasis more precociously and give some benefice for early diagnosis of lymph nodes recurrence. The principle purpose of this study is to evaluate if the systematic follow-up per PET-TDM allows detecting more often recurrences accessible to a curative surgery. We make the hypothesis that the systematic practice of PET- tomodensitometry (TDM) during the follow-up of CRC allows to decrease non curative recurrences appearance during the 3 years follow-up after a curative surgery.