Whole solid tumor volume histogram parameters for predicting the recurrence in patients with epithelial ovarian carcinoma: a feasibility study on quantitative DCE-MRI.

Background: Preoperative prediction of the recurrence of epithelial ovarian carcinoma (EOC) can guide the clinical treatment and improve the prognosis. However, there are still no reliable predictive biomarkers.

Purpose: To evaluate whether whole solid tumor volume histogram parameters measured from quantitative dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) can predict the recurrence in patients with EOC.

Material And Methods: We followed up 56 patients with surgical and histopathologically diagnosed EOC who underwent quantitative DCE-MRI scans. The differences of the histogram parameters between patients with and without recurrence were compared. Mann-Whitney U test, Pearson's Chi-squared test, or Fisher's exact test, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used for statistical analysis.

Results: All histogram parameters of K, k, and v were not significantly different between EOC patients with and without recurrence (>0.05). For 30 patients with high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma (HGSOC), the histogram parameters of K (mean and 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th percentiles) and k (mean and 50th percentile) in 12 patients with recurrence were significantly lower than those in 18 patients without recurrence (all <0.05). ROC curves showed that the 5th percentile of K had the largest area under the curve (AUC) of 0.792 for predicting the recurrence in patients with HGSOC. When the threshold value was ≤0.0263/min, the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were 100%, 66.7%, and 80%, respectively.

Conclusion: Instead of predicting the recurrence of EOC, whole solid tumor volume quantitative DCE-MRI histogram parameters could predict the recurrence of HGSOC and may be potential biomarkers for the prediction of HGSOC recurrence.