Feasibility and safety of contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance-guided adaptive radiotherapy for upper abdominal tumors: A preliminary exploration

Abstract

This study investigates the use of contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance (MR) in MR-guided adaptive radiotherapy (MRgART) for upper abdominal tumors. Contrast-enhanced T1-weighted MR (cT1w MR) using half doses of gadoterate was used to guide daily adaptive radiotherapy for tumors poorly visualized without contrast. The use of gadoterate was found to be feasible and safe in 5-fraction MRgART and could improve the contrast-to-noise ratio of MR images. And the use of cT1w MR could reduce the interobserver variation of adaptive tumor delineation compared to plain T1w MR (4.41 vs. 6.58, p < 0.001) and T2w MR (4.41 vs. 7.42, p < 0.001).