Multiparametric assessment of high-grade pediatric soft-tissue sarcomas with anatomic and functional MRI sequences: a retrospective study.

Abstract

To evaluate multiparametric MRI features of pediatric soft-tissue sarcomas, comparing pre-treatment and post-treatment features, and assessing correlation with clinical outcomes. Retrospective cohort study, including pediatric patients (≤ 18 years) with histologically-confirmed soft-tissue sarcomas who underwent MRI with anatomic and functional sequences in consecutive series. Post-treatment MRI was available for a subset, and features were recorded by two readers. Pre-treatment and post-treatment features were compared using Wilcoxon signed-rank test with Hodges-Lehmann estimator. Inter-reader agreement was assessed with intraclass correlation coefficient, and Mann-Whitney and Cox regression tests were used to correlate the features with clinical outcome. There were 27 patients. Pre-treatment we measured tumor size, ADCminimum (mean: 507 × 10-6mm²/s) and ADCaverage (mean: 690 × 10-6mm²/s). Post-treatment (10 patients) included a reduction in tumor size (p = 0.002) and higher ADCminimum (mean: 1116 × 10-6mm²/s) and ADCaverage (mean: 1344 × 10-6mm²/s) values. Pre-treatment size was larger in patients with metastasis at baseline (p = 0.004) and progression (p = 0.002), but size change after treatment did not correlate with progression. Baseline ADC​​ did not correlate with progression, but the group with progression showed less difference between pre- and post-treatment ADCminimum (p = 0.019) and ADCaverage (p = 0.032). There was excellent agreement between the readers measuring ADCminimum (ICC = 0.991) and ADCaverage (ICC = 0.978). For high-grade pediatric soft-tissue sarcomas, the pre-treatment size is an important prognostic factor, and a reduction in tumor size was observed after treatment, but did not correlate with progression. However, changes to ADC values between pre-treatment and post-treatment MRI correlated with disease progression, suggesting that ADC is a potentially useful biomarker of clinical outcome.