The clinical application of CT perfusion in assessing the status of axillary lymph nodes in patients with breast cancer / 中华放射学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To evaluate the clinical application of CT perfusion in predicting the status of axillary lymph nodes in patients with breast cancer.Methods Fony-five patients with infiltrating breast cancers and 46 clinically palpable axillary lymph nodes underwent dynamic mtdti-slice spiral CT(MSCT).Semi-automatic calculation of perfusion parameters including blood flow(BF),blood volume(BV),mean transit time(MTT)and permeability surface(PS)of "target" lymph nodes and muscles in the same scan level were respectively meagured and analyzed.Nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test was used for the statistics.Results Forty-six "target" lymph nodes examined by CTP were metastasis in 32 cases and reactive hyperplastic lymph node inflammation in 14 cases at pathology.22 of 32 metastatic "target" nodes (68%)were sentinel lymph nodes(SLN).BF of CIP for inflammation and metastatic "target" nodes were (76.18±31.53)and(161.60±40.94)ml·100 mg-1·min-1,BV were(5.81±2.50)and(9.15±3.02)ml／100 mg.MTT were(6.80±1.55)and(5.50±1.84)s,PS were(25.82±4.62)and (25.96±7.47)ml·100 mg-1·min-1.There were significant correlations between the BF value of inflammation and metastatic "target" nodes(r=0.14,P<0.05)and there were no significant correlations among the BV,MTT and PS values of inflammation and metastatic "target" nodes(r=-0.03,0.05,0.07.P>0.05).Conelusion CTP can provide useful informafion for evaluating lymph node status.