Prediction of therapeutic response of hepatocellular carcinoma to CalliSpheres drug-eluting bead transcatheter arterial chemoembolization based on pretherapeutic dynamic CT and textural findings

Purpose: The objective of our study was to assess the value of CT texture analysis for prediction of therapeutic response of hepatocellular carcinoma to CalliSpheres Drug-Eluting Bead TACE with pretherapeutic dynamic CT.

Materials and Methods: 40 patients with Hcc received D-TACE admitted to Shandong Cancer Hospital from April 2018 to December 2019 were analyzed retrospectively．The short-term efficacy of patients was evaluated according to mRECIST criteria. Patients with CR and PR were good prognosis group(A), and those with SD and PD were poor prognosis group (B). CT enhanced texture technology was used to analyze CT axial enhanced images, draw the tumor boundary, and obtain two groups of texture analysis mean, entropy, skewness, kurtosis and non-uniformity layer by layer. Draw the (ROC) curve of the subjects' working characteristics to analyze the predictive value of various texture parameters for D-TACE treatment of liver cancer.

Results: Of the 40 patients, 26 remission, 8 stable, 6 progress. The mean value of group A was higher than that of group B, while the entropy and inhomogeneity of group A were significantly lower than those of group B (P < 0. 05). There was no difference in skewness and kurtosis between the two groups (P > 0.05). Tumor CT mean, entropy and non-uniformity all have certain value in predicting the short-term risk of tumor progression after D-TACE, and their AUC are 0.785, 0.694 and 0.761 respectively.

Conclusion: The enhanced CT texture analysis technique has an important predictive value for the risk of short－term tumor recurrence in patients with HCC after D-TACE，which needs further investigation．