Risk analysis in peripheral clinical T1 non-small cell lung cancer correlations between tumor-to-blood standardized uptake ratio on 18F-FDG PET-CT and primary tumor pathological invasiveness: a real-world observational study

Xiao-Feng Li; Yun-Mei Shi; Rong Niu; Xiao-Nan Shao; Jian-Feng Wang; Xiao-Liang Shao; Fei-Fei Zhang; Yue-Tao Wang

doi:10.21037/qims-21-394

Risk analysis in peripheral clinical T1 non-small cell lung cancer correlations between tumor-to-blood standardized uptake ratio on ¹⁸F-FDG PET-CT and primary tumor pathological invasiveness: a real-world observational study

Quant Imaging Med Surg. 2022 Jan;12(1):159-171. doi: 10.21037/qims-21-394.

Authors

Xiao-Feng Li^{1

2}, Yun-Mei Shi¹, Rong Niu¹, Xiao-Nan Shao¹, Jian-Feng Wang¹, Xiao-Liang Shao¹, Fei-Fei Zhang¹, Yue-Tao Wang^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Nuclear Medicine, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Changzhou, China.
² Department of Radiology, Xuzhou Cancer Hospital, Xuzhou, China.
³ Changzhou Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging, Changzhou, China.

Abstract

Background: Sublobar resection is not suitable for patients with pathological invasiveness [including lymph node metastasis (LNM), visceral pleural invasion (VPI), and lymphovascular invasion (LVI)] of peripheral clinical T1 (cT1) non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), while primary tumor maximum standardized uptake value (SUV_max) on ¹⁸F-FDG PET-CT is related to pathological invasiveness, the significance differed among different institutions is still challenging. This study explored the relationship between the tumor-to-blood standardized uptake ratio (SUR) of ¹⁸F-FDG PET-CT and primary tumor pathological invasiveness in peripheral cT1 NSCLC patients.

Methods: This retrospective study included 174 patients with suspected lung neoplasms who underwent preoperative ¹⁸F-FDG PET-CT. We compared the differences of the clinicopathological variables, metabolic and morphological parameters in the pathological invasiveness and less-invasiveness group. We performed a trend test for these parameters based on the tertiles of SUR. The relationship between SUR and pathological invasiveness was evaluated by univariate and multivariate logistics regression models (included unadjusted, simple adjusted, and fully adjusted models), odds ratios (ORs), and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) were calculated. A smooth fitting curve between SUR and pathological invasiveness was produced by the generalized additive model (GAM).

Results: Thirty-eight point five percent of patients had pathological invasiveness and tended to have a higher SUR value than the less-invasiveness group [6.50 (4.82-11.16) vs. 4.12 (2.04-6.61), P<0.001]. The trend of SUV_max, mean standardized uptake value (SUV_mean), metabolic tumor volume (MTV), total lesion glycolysis (TLG), mean CT value (CT_mean), size of the primary tumor, neuron-specific enolase (NSE), the incidence of LNM, adenocarcinoma (AC), and poor differentiation in the tertiles of SUR value were statistically significant (P were <0.001, <0.001, 0.010, <0.001, <0.001, 0.002, 0.033, <0.001, 0.002, and <0.001, respectively). Univariate analysis showed that the risk of pathological invasiveness increased significantly with increasing SUR [OR: 1.13 (95% CI: 1.06-1.21), P<0.001], and multivariate analysis demonstrated SUR, as a continuous variable, was still significantly related to pathological invasiveness [OR: 1.09 (95% CI: 1.01-1.18), P=0.032] after adjusting for confounding covariates. GAM revealed that SUR tended to be linearly and positively associated with pathological invasiveness and E-value analysis suggested robustness to unmeasured confounding.

Conclusions: SUR is linearly and positively associated with primary tumor pathological invasiveness independent of confounding covariates in peripheral cT1 NSCLC patients and could be used as a supplementary risk maker to assess the risk of pathological invasiveness.

Keywords: Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC); PET-CT; odds ratio (OR); risk factor.