Prediction of early response to concurrent chemoradiotherapy in cervical cancer: Value of multi-parameter MRI combined with clinical prognostic factors

Xiaomin Zheng & Liting Qian et al. · 2020-07-02

This study aimed to investigate the prediction of early response to concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) through a combination of pretreatment multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with clinical prognostic factors (CPF) in cervical cancer patients. Eighty-five patients with pathologically confirmed cervical cancer underwent conventional MRI, intravoxel incoherent motion diffusion weighted imaging (IVIM-DWI), and dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) before CCRT. The patients were divided into non- and residual tumor groups according to post-treatment MRI. Univariable and multivariable analyses were performed to pretreatment MRI parameters and CPF between the two groups, and optimal thresholds and predictive performance for post-treatment residual tumor occurrence were estimated by drawing the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. There were 52 patients in non- and 33 in residual group. The residual group showed a lower perfusion fraction (f) value and volume transfer constant (K Pretreatment D, K