Rohde M, et al. - Experts evaluated if the staging of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) by upfront ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT (ie on the day of biopsy and before the biopsy) discriminated survival better compared to the traditional imaging strategies using chest x-ray plus head and neck MRI (CXR/MRI) or chest CT plus head and neck MRI (CCT/MRI). Patients were recruited from Odense University Hospital from September 2013 to March 2016. It was determined that cancer stages based on PET/CT were related to major differences in mortality risk on Kaplan–Meier analyses compared to CXR/MRI or CCT/MRI. The inference drawn was that tumor stages determined by PET/CT were associated with more distinct prognostic properties with regard to survival vs those determined by standard imaging strategies.