Resumen
In the past, radiomics studies of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) were only based on basic MR sequences. Previous studies have shown that radiomics methods based on T2-weighted imaging and contrast-enhanced T1-weighted imaging have been successfully used to improve the prognosis of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma. The purpose of this study was to explore the predictive efficacy of radiomics analyses based on readout-segmented echo-planar diffusion-weighted imaging (RESOLVE-DWI) which quantitatively reflects the diffusion motion of water molecules for prognosis evaluation in nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Several prognostic radiomics models were established by using diffusion-weighted imaging, apparent diffusion coefficient maps, T2-weighted and contrast-enhanced T1-weighted imaging to predict the risk of recurrence or metastasis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and the predictive effects of different models were compared. The results show that the model based on MRI DWI can successfully predict the prognosis of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma and has higher predictive efficiency than the model based on the conventional sequence, which suggests MRI DWI-radiomics can provide a useful and alternative approach for survival estimation.