Textural features on 18F-FDG PET/CT and dynamic contrast-enhanced MR imaging for predicting treatment response and survival of patients with hypopharyngeal carcinoma

Abstract

The utility of multimodality molecular imaging for predicting treatment response and survival of patients with hypopharyngeal carcinoma remains unclear. Here, we sought to investigate whether the combination of different molecular imaging parameters may improve outcome prediction in this patient group.Patients with pathologically proven hypopharyngeal carcinoma scheduled to undergo chemoradiotherapy (CRT) were deemed eligible. Besides clinical data, parameters obtained from pretreatment 2-deoxy-2-[fluorine-18]fluoro-D-glucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography (18F-FDG PET/CT), dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and diffusion-weighted MRI were analyzed in relation to treatment response, recurrence-free survival (RFS), and overall survival (OS).A total of 61 patients with advanced-stage disease were examined. After CRT, 36% of the patients did not achieve a complete response. Total lesion glycolysis (TLG) and texture feature entropy were found to predict treatment response. The transfer constant (Ktrans), TLG, and entropy were associated with RFS, whereas Ktrans, blood plasma volume (Vp), standardized uptake value (SUV), and entropy were predictors of OS. Different scoring systems based on the sum of PET- or MRI-derived prognosticators enabled patient stratification into distinct prognostic groups (P