title: The relationship between nasopharyngeal carcinoma tumor volume and TNM T-classification: a quantitative analysis.
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.
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Engineering Research Centre, School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, Singapore, Singapore. jyzhou@ntu.edu.sg
authors.forename: Jia-Yin
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Vincent F H
authors.initials: VF
authors.lastname: Chong
authors.forename: James B K
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Khoo
authors.forename: Kap-Luk
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: Chan
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Huang
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009303:Nasopharyngeal Neoplasms / Q000145:classification* / Q000473:pathology* / Q000532:radiotherapy; D009367:Neoplasm Staging; D011379:Prognosis; D012189:Retrospective Studies