Pretreatment synthetic magnetic resonance imaging predicts disease progression in nonmetastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma after intensity modulation radiation therapy

BACKGROUND: To investigate the potential of synthetic MRI (SyMRI) in the prognostic assessment of patients with nonmetastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), and the predictive value when combined with diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) as well as clinical factors. METHODS: Fifty-three NPC patients who underwent SyMRI were prospectively included. 10th Percentile, Mean, Kurtosis, and Skewness of T1, T2, and PD maps and ADC value were obtained from the primary tumor. Cox regression analysis was used for analyzing the association between SyMRI and DWI parameters and progression-free survival (PFS), and then age, sex, staging, and treatment as confounding factors were also included. C-index was obtained by bootstrap. Moreover, significant parameters were used to construct models in predicting 3-year disease progression. ROC curves and leave-one-out cross-validation were used to evaluate the performance and stability. RESULTS: Disease progression occurred in 16 (30.2%) patients at a follow-up of 39.6 (3.5, 48.2) months. T1_Kurtosis, T1_Skewness, T2_10th, PD_Mean, and ADC were correlated with PFS, and T1_Kurtosis (HR: 1.093) and ADC (HR: 1.009) were independent predictors of PFS. The C-index of SyMRI and SyMRI + DWI + Clinic models was 0.687 and 0.779. Moreover, the SyMRI + DWI + Clinic model predicted 3-year disease progression better than DWI or Clinic model (p ≤ 0.008). Interestingly, there was no significant difference between the SyMRI model (AUC: 0.748) and SyMRI + DWI + Clinic model (AUC: 0.846, p = 0.092). CONCLUSION: SyMRI combined with histogram analysis could predict disease progression in NPC patients, and SyMRI + DWI + Clinic model further improved the predictive performance. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13244-023-01411-y.