Diagnostic Value of Multimodal Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Discriminating Between Metastatic and Non-Metastatic Pelvic Lymph Nodes in Cervical Cancer.

Abstract

BackgroundThe status of pelvic lymph node (PLN) metastasis affects treatment and prognosis plans in patients with cervical cancer. However, it is hard to be diagnosed in clinical practice.PurposeThe present study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic value of multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in discriminating between metastatic and non-metastatic pelvic lymph nodes (PLNs) in cervical cancer.MethodsThis retrospective study analyzed MRIs of 209 PLNs in 25 women with pathologically proven cervical cancer. All PLNs had been assessed by pre-treatment multimodal MRIs, and their status was finally confirmed by histopathology. In conventional MRI, lymph node characteristics were compared between metastatic and non-metastatic PLNs. Signal intensity, time–intensity curve (TIC) patterns minimal and mean apparent diffusion coefficients (ADC) were compared between them in DWI. In DCE-MRI, quantitative (Ktrans, Kep and Ve) analyses were performed on DCE-MRI sequences, and their predictive values were analyzed by ROC curves.ResultsOf 209 PLNs, 22 (10.53%) were metastases and 187 (89.47%) were non-metastases at histopathologic examination. Considering a comparison of lymph node characteristics, the short axis size, the long axis size, and the boundary differed significantly between the two groups (P<0.05).The differences in ADCmin, TIC types, Ktrans and Ve between metastatic and non-metastatic PLNs were significant as well (P<0.05). The good diagnostic performance of multimodal MRI was shown in discriminating between metastatic and non-metastatic PLNs, with the sensitivity of 85.0% (17/20), specificity of 97.3% (184/189), and accuracy of 96.2% (201/209). ROC analyses showed that the diagnostic accuracy of ADCmin, Ktrans and Ve for discriminating between metastatic and non-metastatic PLNs in cervical cancer was 83.7%, 91.4%, and 92.4% with the cut-off values of 0.72 × 10−3mm2/s, 0.52 min−1, and 0.53 min−1, respectively.ConclusionMultimodal MRI showed good diagnostic performance in determining PLN status in cervical cancer.