ABSTRACT
Objective To provide objective parameters for differentiating pancreatic cystic tumors via using computed tomography texture analysis (CTTA) to quantify the special imaging features of pancreatic cystadenomas.Methods Enhanced CT images of pancreas from patients who were admitted in Department of Radiology in First Hospital affiliated with Zhejiang University and First People's Hospital of Hangzhou City and pathologically diagnosed as pancreatic serous cystadenomas (n =48) and mucinous cystadenomas (n =34) from January 2009 to December 2016 were retrospectively analyzed.Regions of interest were drawn on the parenchymal phase CT images in 5 slices according to the border of the tumors.Mean grey level intensity (M),variance (V),entropy (E),skewness (Ske) and kurtosis (Kur) were obtained from fine texture (σ =1.0) to coarse texture (σ =2.5).Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for texture parameters with statistically difference was drawn,and the area under curve (AUC),diagnostic sensitivity and specificity were calculated.The diagnostic accuracy of senior and junior doctors was compared with the traditional CT analysis method.Results Reliability coefficient of the two radiologists was 0.809 ～ 0.997 with high consistency.Compared with mucinous cystic tumors,serous cystadenomas had a significantly different V (5.93 ± 9.02 vs 1.29±0.62),E (2.39±0.61 vs2.02±0.39) and Kur(30.18 ±42.55 vs 8.80-±4.34) in Ske0 of 2.5 (P ＜0.05),and there were no statistically significant differences on other parameters.The AUC of differential parameters for diagnosing two kinds of cystic tumors ranged from 0.56 to 0.84.The diagnostic accuracy of the traditional CT analysis method by junior doctor and senior radiologist was 60％ and 71％,respectively.Conclusions CTTA can not only effectively quantify the heterogeneity of pancreatic cystadenomas,but also is effective in the differentiation.