A Pilot Study of Texture Analysis of Primary Tumor [¹⁸F]FDG Uptake to Predict Recurrence in Surgically Treated...

To examine whether the heterogeneous texture parameters in primary tumor can predict prognosis of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) received surgery after 2-deoxy-2-[¹⁸F]fluoro-D-glucose ([¹⁸F]FDG) positron emission tomography (PET)/X-ray computed tomography (CT).

This retrospective study included 55 patients with NSCLC who underwent [¹⁸F]FDG-PET/CT before surgery from January 2011 and December 2015. SUV-related (SUVmax and SUVmean), volumetric (metabolic tumor volume [SUV ≥ 2.5], and total lesion glycolysis) and texture parameters (local parameters; entropy, homogeneity, and dissimilarity and regional parameters; intensity variability [IV], size-zone variability [SZV], and zone percentage [ZP]) were obtained. Tumor size, TNM stage, SUV-related, volumetric, and texture parameters were compared between the patients with progression and without progression using Mann-Whitney's U or χ² test and progression-free survival (PFS) and prognostic significance were assessed by Kaplan-Meier method and Cox regression analysis, respectively.

Nineteen patients eventually showed progression, and 36 patients were alive without progression during clinical follow-up (median follow-up PFS; 23 months [range, 1-71]). The patients with progression showed significantly larger tumor size (p < 0.001), higher IV (p = 0.010), and higher SZV (p = 0.007) than those without progression. PFS was significantly shorter in patients with large tumor size (p = 0.008), high T stage (p = 0.009), high stage (p = 0.013), high IV (p = 0.012), and high SZV (p = 0.015) at univariate analysis. At multivariate analysis, stage (hazard ratio [HR] 1.62, p = 0.035) and IV (hazard ratio 6.19, p = 0.048) were only remained independent predictors for PFS.

The regional heterogeneity texture parameters IV and SZV can predict tumor progression, and IV has the potential to predict prognosis of surgically treated NSCLC patients.