Yet the doctor that did the last scan told him the growth was detectable on each of his brain scans.
Horrible situation. Prayers up for this poor man and for his family.
St. Perregrine, pray for him.
Yeah, this is how this occurs. An initial scan or two can either miss a small finding or misinterpret it as incidental. Then on a later scan when the new diagnosis is obvious, the previous findings in retrospect are traced to the current finding.
There are only three ways to act on an abnormal imagine study.
1. Ignore it ( bad option).
2. Biopsy it ( which would injure a lot of healthy people if every spot was biopsied, especially in an organ like the brain)
3. Repeat the study at a future interval to see if it changes. If so, this adds more credence to #2.
In this case, it looks like the image was asked to be repeated and it was not. This can happen if the first MRI was done at say an ER, and then the patient goes back to the primary doc and communication about the recommendation to repeat the study was not made.