Amide proton transfer-weighted imaging for hepatocellular carcinoma: Correlation with Ki-67 labeling index

Conventional MRI methods are difficult to reveal histologic and molecular characteristic heterogeneity of HCC. In this study, we aimed to investigate the relationship between APTw and Ki-67 labeling index (LI) in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) to evaluate whether APTw can reflect the pathological information of HCC at the molecular level. It was found that APTw values were significantly different between low and high Ki-67 LI in HCC, and the AUC to distinguish high and low Ki-67 LI was 0.794, indicating APTw imaging might be a potential molecular technique for predicting the malignancy grade of HCC