Prediction of microvascular invasion in solitary hepatocellular carcinoma using bi-regional quantitative dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI

The peri-tumoral region (PTR) of liver is the main-site of microvascular invasion (MVI) taken place, and contains perfusion information which could reflected the hemodynamic change during MVI. This study investigated the value of quantitative dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) to evaluate the MVI status of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in both intra-tumoral region (ITR) and PTR. The result showed quantitative DCE-MRI perfusion parameters could predict the MVI status in both ITR and PTR. Combining parameters from ITR and PTR could improve the prediction performance. Our study suggest quantitative DCE-MRI perfusion parameters could be employed as an efficient approach to predicting MVI status.