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To characterize small renal cell carcinoma using diffusion relaxation correlation spectroscopic imaging and apparent diffusion coefficient based histogram analysis: a preliminary study

  • Abdominal Radiology
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Abstract

Purpose

To study the capability of diffusion-relaxation correlation spectroscopic imaging (DR-CSI) on subtype classification and grade differentiation for small renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Histogram analysis for apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) was studied for comparison.

Materials and methods

A total of 61 patients with small RCC (< 4 cm) were included in the retrospective study. MRI data were reviewed, including a multi-b (0–1500 s/mm2) multi-TE (51–200 ms) diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) sequence. Region of interest (ROI) was delineated manually on DWI to include solid tumor. For each patient, a D-T2 spectrum was fitted and segmented into 5 compartments, and the volume fractions VA, VB, VC, VD, VE were obtained. ADC mapping was calculated, and histogram parameters ADC 90th, 10th, median, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis were obtained. All MRI metrices were compared between clear cell RCC (ccRCC) and non-ccRCC group, and between high-grade and low-grade group. Receiver operator curve analysis was used to assess the corresponding diagnostic performance.

Results

Significantly higher ADC 90th, ADC 10th and ADC median, and significantly lower DR-CSI VB was found for ccRCC compared to non-ccRCC. Significantly lower ADC 90th, ADC median and significantly higher VB was found for high-grade RCC compared to low-grade. For identifying ccRCC from non-ccRCC, VB showed the highest area under curve (AUC, 0.861) and specificity (0.882). For differentiating high- from low-grade, ADC 90th showed the highest AUC (0.726) and specificity (0.786), while VB also displayed a moderate AUC (0.715).

Conclusion

DR-CSI may offer improved accuracy in subtype identification for small RCC, while do not show better performance for small RCC grading compared to ADC histogram.

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Funding

No funding was received for conducting this study.

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Author notes

  1. Yongming Dai and Mengying Zhu have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biomedical Engineering & State Key Laboratory of Advanced Medical Materials and Devices & Shanghai Clinical Research and Trial Center, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China

    Yongming Dai & Peng Hu

  2. Department of Radiology, Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Mengying Zhu, Wentao Hu, Shenyun He, Yuansheng Luo, Xiaobin Wei, Yan Zhou & Guangyu Wu

  3. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Dongmei Wu

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  1. Yongming Dai
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Contributions

Study conception and design were performed by [YD]. Material preparation and data collection were performed by [MZ], [SH], [YL], [XW], and [GW]. Data analysis were performed by [WH] and [DW]. The first draft of the manuscript was written and reviewed by [YD], [YZ] and [PH], and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Guangyu Wu or Peng Hu.

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Conflict interest

The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

Ethical approval

This retrospective study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Renji hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and the consents from patients were waived.

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Informed consent was waived for all individual participants included in the study for its retrospective nature.

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The authors affirm that human research participants provided informed consent for publication of the images in Fig. 1–3.

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Dai, Y., Zhu, M., Hu, W. et al. To characterize small renal cell carcinoma using diffusion relaxation correlation spectroscopic imaging and apparent diffusion coefficient based histogram analysis: a preliminary study. Radiol med (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11547-024-01819-6

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