Clinical Study Perfusion in the Tissue Surrounding Pancreatic Cancer and the Patient’s Prognosis

Copyright © 2014 Yoshihiro Nishikawa et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Objective. The objective was to investigate the relationship between prognosis in case of pancreatic cancer and perfusion in tissue surrounding pancreatic cancer using perfusion CT.Methods. We enrolled 17 patients diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic adenocarcinoma. All patients were examined by perfusion CT and then underwent chemotherapy using gemcitabine. The time density curve (TDC) of each CT pixel was analyzed to calculate area under the curve (AUC) and blood flow (BF) using a mathematical algorithm based on the single-compartment model. To measure the AUC and BF of tumor (AUCT and BFT) and peritumoral tissue (AUCPTT and BFPTT), regions of interest were manually placed on the cancer and in pancreatic tissue within 10mm of proximal pancreatic parenchyma. Survival days from the date of perfusion CT were recorded. Correlation between AUC or BF and survival days was assessed. Results. We found a significant correlation between AUCPTT or BFPTT and survival days