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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2021 Jun 1.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Phys. 2020 Aug 10;16(12):1232–1237. doi: 10.1038/s41567-020-0978-6

Figure 1. A superlinear scaling law governs glucose uptake and proliferation in human cancers.

Figure 1

Log-log plots of 18F-FDG uptake (TLA) versus metabolic tumour volume on diagnostic PET for breast cancer, head & neck cancer, non-small-cell lung cancer and rectal cancer display superlinear (β > 1) allometric scaling laws. Diagnostic PET with proliferation radiotracers, either 18F-FLT for breast cancer or 18F-FCHOL for glioma, shows the same dependence pointing to the use of glucose mostly as a resource for biosynthesis. The fitted exponents cluster around β = 5/4. Joint records of patients imaged in the same institution with identical protocol (breast-FDG, lung and rectal cancers), show that a common scaling law governs the dynamics. Error bars in (g) correspond to the standard error in the fitted parameter β obtained using fitlm.