Detection of gastric cancer and its histological type based on iodine concentration in spectral CT

Gastric cancer is the fifth most common cancer and the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide [1]. Gastric adenocarcinoma comprises 95% of all gastric cancers [2]. The incidence and mortality rates associated with gastric adenocarcinoma are both the highest among all malignant tumors of the digestive tract in China [3, 4], representing an emerging threat to human health. The mean survival time of patients with advanced gastric cancer is less than 1 year [5]. Therefore, early detection, diagnosis and treatment are advocated to improve the clinical outcomes and quality of life in patients with gastric cancer.

Histological grading has been considered a predictor of lymph node metastasis and poor survival in gastric cancer [6]. Hence, accurate assessment of histological types is crucial for individualizing patient management [7]. Gold standard for the diagnosis of gastric cancer and its histological types can be obtained through preoperative endoscopic biopsy in clinical practice. However, endoscopic biopsy is an invasive procedure, and may posses unavoidable sampling bias and incoincident with histological diagnosis during surgery [8]. As compared to invasive endoscopic biopsy, preoperative imaging technique offers many advantages as its non-invasive detection and histologic evaluation of tumors, as well as the assessment of regional or distant lymph node metastasis. Conventional contrast-enhanced CT imaging is the first-line imaging modality for the detection and staging of gastric cancer. Its combination with multiple planar reconstruction and virtual endoscopy has proven to be effective for the diagnosis of gastric wall invasion in patients with gastric cancer [9]. However, this technique relies solely on the morphological criteria, and lack of parameters for quantitative analysis.

Spectral CT provides material decomposition (MD) images that can quantitatively map the iodine concentration (IC) in the enhanced images of tissues. This IC value has been found to be strongly correlated with the actual IC in the phantom [10]. Preliminary studies have reported the use of IC value in differentiating benign from malignant lesions, evaluating tumor, node, and metastasis (TNM) staging and determining the efficacy of anticancer therapy [11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]. However, to the best of our knowledge, only a few studies have employed IC value in discriminating the histological types of gastric adenocarcinoma [12, 17], and the results are inconsistent with respect to arterial phase (AP) and portal venous phase (PP). Indeed, the application of IC values for the discrimination of gastric cancer and its histological types is still in the exploratory stage.

Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of IC values for the detection of gastric cancer and its histological type, and to investigate their correlations with clinical data.

Spectral CT extends the capabilities of conventional CT, which uses a rapid kilovoltage switching technique to acquire monochromatic images of tissues, in a similar way to those obtained from a single X-ray source [18, 19, 20]. Subsequent elemental decomposition analysis can be performed to obtain iodinated contrast attenuation map, thereby allowing iodine density to be calculated [21, 22]. As a result, this can assist the radiologists to address diagnostic errors. Hence, the present study investigated the role of quantitative spectral CT parameters for the discrimination of gastric cancer and its histological types, and examined their correlations with clinical features. The major findings of this study were as follow: (1) IC values in gastric cancer were higher than benign gastric wall lesions, in which nICPP demonstrated the greatest diagnostic efficacy; (2) IC values in poorly differentiated gastric adenocarcinoma were higher than in well-differentiated caners, in which nICAP showed the highest diagnostic efficacy; and (3) IC values were not significantly different between age, gender, tumor thickness and tumor location.

Iodine concentration reflects the vessel density and the blood volume in different tissue regions during a contrast-enhanced CT scan. Tang et al. [15] reported a high consistency between spectral CT-measured IC and actual IC, and thus it is a useful parameter to indicate the physiological function. The growth and progression of solid tumors depend upon the formation of new blood vessels, which is different from normal tissues or benign lesions. Several studies have reported that CT imaging is useful for distinguishing small hepatocellular carcinoma from other hepatic lesions [23, 24], small intrahepatic mass-forming cholangiocarcinoma from small liver abscess [25], malignant from benign pulmonary nodules [26], and gastric cancer from benign gastric mucosal lesions [11]. Indeed, the quantitative IC measurement is significantly higher in cancerous lesions compared to benign lesions, and its accuracy is greater than that of conventional CT. In addition, Liu et al. examined the patients with papillary thyroid cancer, and their results suggested that nIC measured during AP and PP are significantly higher in metastatic lymph nodes as compared to benign lesions [27]. Taken together, our results are consistent with the aforementioned studies, in which the values of IC are higher in cancer than in benign lesions, due to the increased angiogenesis during tumor development, leading to their enhancement in CT scan [28].

The degree of tumor differentiation is a predictive and prognosis biomarker for patients with gastric cancer [29], which can be distinguished quantitatively by dual-energy spectral CT (DESCT). Pan et al. [12] evaluated the clinical usefulness of DESCT in the classification and staging of gastric cancer. Their findings indicated that monochromatic images obtained from DESCT can be used to improve the accuracy of preoperative staging, and quantitative IC measurement is helpful in distinguishing the poorly and well-differentiated gastric carcinoma, as well as the metastatic and non-metastatic lymph nodes. A similar pattern of results was obtained, where IC and nIC values were significantly lower in well-differentiated gastric cancer compared to poorly differentiated ones, which can be explained by the differences in tumor angiogenesis. Du et al. [30] have suggested that vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression and microvessel density (MVD) are closely correlated with histological degree, in which their levels are reduced in early stage gastric carcinoma compared to progressive carcinoma. Chang et al. [31] have reported that MVD is significantly associated with poorly differentiated gastric adenocarcinoma. Moreover, Hu et al. [32] demonstrated that the nIC value of three-phase enhanced CT scan is positively correlated with MVD. Additionally, Chen et al. reported that poorly differentiated gastric cancer exhibited higher MVD and nIC value, and a positive correlation between them [33]. A CT perfusion study on gastric cancer has revealed that the lower the degree of tumor differentiation, the higher the permeability surface area [34]. These findings indicate that poorly differentiated tumors may increase vasopermeability and immature endothelial cells, thereby explaining the high values of IC and MVD in gastric patients with poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma.

nIC can minimize the effects of individual variability, such as contrast dose, injection rate and individual differences in circulation, and thereby it is more efficacy than IC. Both nICAP and nICPP were found to be significantly different between gastric cancer group and benign gastric wall lesions group, as well as between poorly differentiated group and well-differentiated group. In particular, nICAP demonstrated a higher efficiency in the diagnosis of poorly differentiated gastric adenocarcinoma, with AUC, sensitivity and specificity of 0.896, 79.07 and 95.45%, respectively. Meanwhile, nICPP showed a higher efficacy for the detection of gastric cancer, with AUC, sensitivity and specificity of 0.923, 91.95 and 87.96%, respectively. These results can be partly explained by different functional roles of nICAP and nICPP. nICAP mainly reflects the capillary density and the blood supply of gastric carcinomas, while nICPP may indicate the flow of blood supply and the retention of contrast agent in intrasvasular and extravascular space following AP. It is noticeable that venous phase enhancement is more prominent in gastric cancer, suggesting that PP enhancement characteristics are more useful for the detection of gastric cancer. Besides, the reason why PP is less effective than AP in distinguishing histological types may be due to the influence of blood flow. In addition, nICPP has been reported to exert a high sensitivity in differentiating malignant gastric mucosal lesions from normal gastric mucosa [11]. Furthermore, studies on the diagnostic efficacy of tumor differentiation degree are inconsistent [35, 36], which may be due to the different biological behaviors of tumors and degrees of differentiation. A previous study has found that the values of IC and nIC of poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma are not significantly different compared to those of moderately and well-differentiated adenocarcinomas in AP [17]. These inconsistent results may be attributed to different patient populations and scan protocol. In that study, patients were subjected to triple-phase CT imaging, including AP at 25 s, which are different from ours. In sum, DESCT is more useful in evaluating gastric cancer with a delay AP scan protocol.

Apart from that, Karim et al. [37] reported that younger age is correlated with the histology grade of gastric cancer. However, the histology grade is not correlated with gender and tumor location [38]. In addition, Wang et al. [38] demonstrated that tumour size is a prognostic factor in patients with advanced gastric cancer. In the present study, no significant differences were found in the values of ICAP, ICPP, nICAP and nICPP between age, gender, tumor thickness and tumor location.

There are some unavoidable limitations in this preliminary study. First, DESCT scans were performed on the first-generation Discovery CT750 HD scanner with a fixed mA value of 600 mA. This yielded a CTDIvol of 23.84 mGy, which is considerably high in current clinical practise settings. With the introduction of the second-generation CT750 HD scanner, the radiation dose has been reduced to 30% in GSI mode, and further dose reduction is forthcoming. Second, this is a retrospective study, and the sample size was relatively small, especially the number of patients with well-differentiated adenocarcinoma was too low to to allow a statistical comparison with moderately and poorly differentiated ones. Third, only patients with gastric adenocarcinoma were enrolled in this study, patients with other histological types of gastric cancer were not taken into account. Moreover, it was difficult to obtain pathologic confirmation of the entire gastric wall in non-cancer patients, and the patients with gastric inflammation and normal gastric wall were grouped together. Finally, since DESCT is a relatively new technique for gastric cancer, it may hinder the adaptation process based on these preliminary results.

In conclusion, this preliminary study compared the quantitative spectral CT parameters between benign lesion and gastric cancer groups, as well as different histological types of gastric adenocarcinoma. IC values can be used to accurately identify gastric cancer and quantitatively assess the degree of differentiation, without being affected by age, gender, tumor thickness and tumor location. These findings may improve the preoperative staging of gastric cancer, and lay the foundations for modern functional imaging in oncology. However, further studies with larger sample sizes are needed to draw a firm conclusion.