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

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.

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.

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.

All histogram parameters of K^trans, k_ep, and v_e were not significantly different between EOC patients with and without recurrence (P>0.05). For 30 patients with high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma (HGSOC), the histogram parameters of K^trans (mean and 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th percentiles) and k_ep (mean and 50th percentile) in 12 patients with recurrence were significantly lower than those in 18 patients without recurrence (all P<0.05). ROC curves showed that the 5th percentile of K^trans 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.

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.