Chen, Fangying
Zhang, Shaoting
Ma, Xiaolu
Chen, Yukun
Wang, Zhen
Zhu, Yan
Bai, Chenguang
Fu, Caixia
Grimm, Robert
Shao, Chengwei
Lu, Jianping
Shen, Fu
Chen, Luguang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3742-9439
Funding for this research was provided by:
National Key Clinical Specialist Construction Programs of China (NA)
Youth Initiative Fund of Naval Medical University (Grant Number 2018QN05)
Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (20ZR1456300)
Article History
Received: 29 April 2022
Revised: 28 July 2022
Accepted: 4 August 2022
First Online: 23 August 2022
Declarations
:
: The scientific guarantor of this publication is Luguang Chen.
: Two coauthors (Caixia Fu and Robert Grimm) are employees of Siemens Healthcare, and they declared that they have no conflict of interest.
: No complex statistical methods were necessary for this paper.
: Written informed consent was waived by the Institutional Review Board.
: Institutional Review Board approval was obtained.
: Twenty-nine patients with pathologically proven as T2 or T3, had been partially reported in our previous study, were included and we further enlarged the sample size in the present study. Previous work mainly aimed to investigate the usefulness of <i>b</i>-value threshold (<i>b</i><sub>Threshold</sub>) map in the evaluation of rectal adenocarcinoma by comparing it with diffusion-weighted images and ADC maps regarding lesion detection and the prediction of pathological features, which found that compared with DWI, the <i>b</i><sub>Threshold</sub> map offers significantly higher CNR, which improves lesion visualization and detection. <i>b</i><sub>Threshold</sub> values could differentiate between pathologic differentiation degrees and T stages and have a better diagnostic performance than ADC for N staging, while several reports showed that tumor budding (TB) is an indicator of metastasis and adverse reaction to neoadjuvant therapy in colorectal cancers, which help assess individualized therapeutic strategies. However, a preoperative and non-invasive approach to evaluate TB grades is lacking. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to investigate the feasibility of <i>b</i><sub>Threshold</sub> maps in preoperative evaluations of TB in patients with locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC), which found <i>b</i><sub>Threshold</sub> values could distinguish different TB grades better than ADC values in LARC patients, and <i>b</i><sub>Threshold</sub> maps may be a preoperative, non-invasive approach to evaluate TB grades.
: • retrospective• diagnostic or prognostic study• performed at one institution