Differentiating the lymph node metastasis of breast cancer through dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging

Objective: Lymph node metastasis is an important trait of breast cancer, and tumors with different lymph node statuses require various clinical treatments. This study was designed to evaluate the lymph node metastasis of breast cancer through pharmacokinetic and histogram analysis via dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI. Methods and materials: A retrospective analysis was conducted to quantitatively evaluate the lymph node statuses of patients with breast cancer. A total of 75 patients, i.e. 34 patients with lymph node metastasis and 41 patients without lymph node metastasis, were involved in this research. Of the patients with lymph node metastases, 19 had sentinel lymph node metastasis, and 15 had axillary lymph node metastasis. MRI was conducted using a 3.0 T imaging device. Segmentation was carried out on the regions of interest (ROIs) in breast tumors under DCE-MRI, and pharmacokinetic and histogram parameters were calculated from the same ROIs. Mann–Whitney U test was performed, and receiver operating characteristic curves for the parameters of the two groups were constructed to determine their diagnostic values. Results: Pharmacokinetic parameters, including Ktrans, Kep, area under the curve of time–concentration, and time to peak, which were derived from the extended Tofts linear model for DCE-MRI, could highlight the tumor areas in the breast and reveal the increased perfusion. Conversely, the pharmacokinetic parameters showed no significant difference between the patients with and without lymph node metastases. By contrast, the parameters from the histogram analysis yielded promising results. The entropy of the ROIs exhibited the best diagnostic ability between patients with and without lymph node metastases (p < 0.01, area under the curve of receiver operating characteristic = 0.765, specificity = 0.706, sensitivity = 0.780). Conclusion: In comparison with the pharmacokinetic parameters, the histogram analysis of the MR images could reveal the differences between patients with and without lymph node metastases. The entropy from the histogram indicated that the diagnostic ability was highly sensitive and specific. Advances in knowledge: This research gave out a promising result on the differentiating lymph node metastases through histogram analysis on tumors in DCE-MR images. Histogram could reveal the tumors heterogenicity between patients with different lymph node status.