Clinical Utility of Liver Stiffness Measurements on Magnetic Resonance Elastrography in Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma Treated with Radiofrequency Ablation

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Purpose: To determine whether liver stiffness (LS) measured by magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) can predict the outcome of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients. Materials and Methods: A total of 107 patients with Child-Pugh class A liver function who were treated with RFA for single HCC and who had undergone a gradient-echo MRE within 6 months before RFA were included. We evaluated the relationship between the LS values and the ablation volume, local tumor progression (LTP), and intrahepatic distant recurrence (IDR). We also constructed receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves to examine the role of LS in predicting liver function deterioration, which was defined as an increase of Child-Pugh score by one point or more at 1 year after RFA. Results: There was no significant correlation between LS and ablation volume, and neither time to LTP nor IDR was associated with LS. Among the 66 patients who did not have recurrence 1 year after RFA, 5 patients (7.6%) developed liver function deterioration. A high LS value was significantly associated with development of liver function deterioration after RFA and the area under the ROC curve was 0.764 (95% CI 0.598-0.929, P = 0.003). Conclusion: LS measured by MRE could not predict ablation volume and tumor recurrence. However, high LS values were significantly associated with development of liver function deterioration.