Erschienen in:
01.02.2007 | Head and Neck
The relationship between nasopharyngeal carcinoma tumor volume and TNM T-classification: a quantitative analysis
verfasst von:
Jia-Yin Zhou, Vincent F. H. Chong, James B. K. Khoo, Kap-Luk Chan, Jing Huang
Erschienen in:
European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology
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Ausgabe 2/2007
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Abstract
Recent findings show that tumor volume is a significant prognostic factor for the treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). The inclusion of tumor volume as an additional prognostic factor in the UICC TNM classification system was suggested; however, how tumor volume could possibly be incorporated is still unexplored. In this paper, we report a quantitative analysis on the relationship between NPC tumor volume and T-classification, using the data from 206 NPC patients. By T-classification and semi-automatic tumor volume measurement, the difference in tumor volumes among the various TNM T-classification groups was examined. In addition, a statistics-based analysis scheme, which used the T-classification as the “gold standard”, was proposed to classify NPC tumors into volume-based groups to explore the possible links. The results show that NPC tumor volume has positive correlation with advancing T-classification groups and significant difference existed in the distribution of T-classification among various volume-based groups (P < 0.001). By the proposed statistical scheme, tumor volume could be included as an additional prognostic factor in the TNM framework, following validation studies.