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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Cancer Imaging and Image-directed Interventions
Volume 15 - 2025 |
doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1388390
The clinical value of computed tomography Hounsfield unit for diagnosing palpable inguinal lymph node metastasis in penile cancer patients
Provisionally accepted- The First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China
In clinical practice, it is found that the cComputed tomography (CT) Hounsfield units (HU) of pathologically confirmed metastatic inguinal lymph nodes (ILN) are were proved to be higher than negative ones. We designed this study to explore the clinical value of CT HU for diagnosing palpable ILN metastasis in penile cancer patients.Methods: A total of 32 penile cancer patients, including 84 palpable ILNs, were recruited in this study. They all performed 5mm layer pelvic contrast-enhanced CT (CE-CT) before treatment. The palpable ILNs were matched with CT image. Using professional image readingGuiding byBy using radiologic software PACS, the layer with maximum cross sectional area of a target lymph node was selected and the short axis across the lymph node was defined as diameter. We outlined the edgetraced outlines of target lymph nodes, and the software automatically calculated its area, maximum CT HU and average CT HU. All target ILNs were biopsied by surgery to confirm the presence of metastasis.Results: Compared with non-metastatic ILNs, metastatic ILNs had larger diameter, area, maximum non-contrast CT (NC-CT) HU, maximum arterial-phase contrast enhanced CT (ACE-CT) HU, average NC-CT HU and average ACE-CT HU, with statistically significant differences (P<0.05). ROC analysis showed the all six parameters (maximum NC-CT HU, maximum ACE-CT HU, average NC-CT HU, average ACE-CT HU, diameter and area) had significant diagnostic value for ILN metastasis, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.847, 0.853, 0.900, 0.919, 0.809 and 0.789, respectively. The average ACE-CT HU (cutoff: 40.5) had the highest accuracy as 0.857 and maximum NC-CT HU (cutoff: 51.5) had the highest sensitivity of 0.897.diagnosed penile cancer patients.
Keywords: Penile Cancer, computed tomography, Hounsfield unit, Inguinal lymph node, metastasis
Received: 01 May 2024; Accepted: 16 Jan 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Chen, Xie, Li and Yin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Gansheng Xie, The First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, 215006, Jiangsu Province, China
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