Whole-lesion apparent diffusion coefficient histogram analysis: significance in T and N staging of gastric cancers

BACKGROUND: Whole-lesion apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) histogram analysis has been introduced and proved effective in assessment of multiple tumors. However, the application of whole-volume ADC histogram analysis in gastrointestinal tumors has just started and never been reported in T and N staging of gastric cancers. METHODS: Eighty patients with pathologically confirmed gastric carcinomas underwent diffusion weighted (DW) magnetic resonance imaging before surgery prospectively. Whole-lesion ADC histogram analysis was performed by two radiologists independently. The differences of ADC histogram parameters among different T and N stages were compared with independent-samples Kruskal-Wallis test. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was performed to evaluate the performance of ADC histogram parameters in differentiating particular T or N stages of gastric cancers. RESULTS: There were significant differences of all the ADC histogram parameters for gastric cancers at different T (except ADC(min) and ADC(max)) and N (except ADC(max)) stages. Most ADC histogram parameters differed significantly between T1 vs T3, T1 vs T4, T2 vs T4, N0 vs N1, N0 vs N3, and some parameters (ADC(5%), ADC(10%), ADC(min)) differed significantly between N0 vs N2, N2 vs N3 (all P < 0.05). Most parameters except ADC(max) performed well in differentiating different T and N stages of gastric cancers. Especially for identifying patients with and without lymph node metastasis, the ADC(10%) yielded the largest area under the ROC curve of 0.794 (95% confidence interval, 0.677–0.911). All the parameters except ADC(max) showed excellent inter-observer agreement with intra-class correlation coefficients higher than 0.800. CONCLUSION: Whole-volume ADC histogram parameters held great potential in differentiating different T and N stages of gastric cancers preoperatively. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12885-017-3622-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.