Immunotherapy has become a cornerstone of the modern cancer treatment. It might be crucial to predict its expression non-invasively by imaging. The present study used diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) quantified by whole lesion apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) values to elucidate possible associations with programmed cell death ligand 1(PD-L1) expression in head and neck squamous cell cancer (HNSCC).
Overall, 29 patients with primary HNSCC of different localizations were involved in the study. DWI was obtained by using a sequence with b
An inverse correlation between skewness derived from ADC values and ICS was identified (r = -0.38, p = 0.04). ADCmax tended to correlate with ICS (r = -0.35, p = 0.06). Other ADC parameters did not show any association with the calculated scores.
There is a weak association between skewness derived from ADC values and PD-L1 expression in HNSCC, which might not be strong enough to predict PD-L1 expression in clinical routine. Presumably, ADC values are more influenced by complex histopathology compartments, comprising cellular and extracellular aspects of tumors than only of a single subset of tumor associated cells.