Assessment of breast cancer response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy based on ultrasound backscattering envelope statistics

Abstract

Neo-adjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is used in breast cancer before tumor surgery to reduce the size of the tumor and the risk of spreading. Monitoring the effects of NAC is important because in a number of cases the response to therapy is poor and requires a change in treatment. A new method that uses quantitative ultrasound to assess tumor response to NAC has been presented. The aim was to detect NAC unresponsive tumors at an early stage of treatment. Methods: The method assumes that ultrasound scattering is different for responsive and nonresponsive tumors. The assessment of the NAC effects was based on the differences between the histograms of the ultrasound echo amplitude recorded from the tumor after each NAC dose and from the tissue phantom, estimated using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistics (KSS) and the symmetrical Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD). After therapy, tumors were resected and histopathologically evaluated. The percentage of residual malignant cells was determined and was the basis for assessing the tumor response. The data set included ultrasound data obtained from 37 tumors. The performance of the methods was assessed by means of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Results: For responding tumors, a decrease in the mean KLD and KSS values was observed after subsequent doses of NAC. In nonresponding tumors, the KLD was higher and did not change in subsequent NAC courses. Classification based on the KSS or KLD parameters allowed to detect tumors not responding to NAC after the first dose of the drug, with AUC equal 0.83±0.06 and 0.84±0.07, respectively. After the third dose, the AUC increased to 0.90±0.05 and 0.91±0.04, respectively. Conclusions:The results indicate the potential usefulness of the proposed parameters in assessing the effectiveness of the NAC and early detection of nonresponding cases.

The Prognostic and Therapeutic Implications of the Chemoresistance Gene BIRC5 in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer

“…Breast cancer (BC) is becoming the most common cancer worldwide [ 1 ]. BC has a poor prognosis, even though precision surgery and adjuvant systemic treatments such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and molecular targeted drugs significantly improve the overall outcome [ 2 ].…”

Monitoring Breast Cancer Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Using Probability Maps Derived from Quantitative Ultrasound Parametric Images

“…Changes in the amplitude distribution of the ultrasonic signal scattered in the tumor after successive cycles of chemotherapy were also studied. The distributions were differentiated by the Kullback-Leibler divergence determined with respect to the distributions after the first NAC cycle [13] or with respect to the reference phantom [14]. The highest AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) was achieved after the 3rd NAC cycle, 0.92 and 0.91 respectively.…”