TY - JOUR AU - Zschaeck, Sebastian AU - Hajiyianni, Marina AU - Hausmann, Patrick AU - Nikulin, Pavel AU - Kukuk, Emily AU - Furth, Christian AU - Cegla, Paulina AU - Lombardo, Elia AU - Kazmierska, Joanna AU - Holzgreve, Adrien AU - Strouthos, Iosif AU - Stromberger, Carmen AU - Belka, Claus AU - Baumann, Michael AU - Krause, Mechthild AU - Landry, Guillaume AU - Cholewinski, Witold AU - Kotzerke, Jorg AU - Zips, Daniel AU - van den Hoff, Jörg AU - Hofheinz, Frank TI - Total lesion glycolysis of primary tumor and lymphnodes is a strong predictor for development of distant metastases in oropharyngeal carcinoma patients with independent validation in automatically delineated lesions. JO - Cancer imaging VL - 25 IS - 1 SN - 1470-7330 CY - London PB - BioMed Central M1 - DKFZ-2025-00422 SP - 18 PY - 2025 AB - Oropharyngeal carcinomas are characterized by an increasing incidence and a relatively good prognosis. Nonetheless, a considerable number of patients develops metachronous distant metastases; identification of these patients is an urgent medical need.This is a retrospective multicenter evaluation of 431 patients. All patients underwent [18F]-FDG positron emission tomography (PET). The cohort was split into an explorative group (n = 366) and a validation group (n = 65). Lesions were manually delineated in the explorative group and automatically delineated by a convolutional neuronal network (CNN) in the validation group. Quantitative PET parameters standardized uptake value (SUV), metabolic tumor volume (MTV), and total lesion glycolysis (TLG) were calculated for primary tumors (prim) and tumor plus lymphnodes (all). Association of parameters with freedom from distant metastases (FFDM) and overall survival (OS) was tested by cox regression analyses.In the explorative group, univariate analyses revealed an association of metric MTVprim (p = 0.022), MTVall (p < 0.001) and TLGall (p < 0.001) with FFDM, binarized parameters were also associated with FFDM (p < 0.001 and p = 0.002). Bootstrap analyses revealed a significantly better association of TLGall compared to TLGprim with FFDM (p = 0.02). MTVall and TLGall remained significantly associated with FFDM upon multivariate testing (p = 0.002, p = 0.031, respectively). In the validation group, the cutoff value for TLGall but not for TLGprim was significantly associated with FFDM (HR = 3.1, p = 0.045). Additional analyses with manually delineated contours of the validation cohort revealed a similar effect (HR = 3.47, p = 0.026). No considerable differences between HPV positive and negative disease were observed.TLGall is a promising biomarker to select OPC patients with high risk for metachronous distant metastases. KW - Humans KW - Oropharyngeal Neoplasms: pathology KW - Oropharyngeal Neoplasms: diagnostic imaging KW - Oropharyngeal Neoplasms: mortality KW - Oropharyngeal Neoplasms: metabolism KW - Male KW - Female KW - Retrospective Studies KW - Middle Aged KW - Glycolysis KW - Aged KW - Fluorodeoxyglucose F18 KW - Positron-Emission Tomography: methods KW - Radiopharmaceuticals KW - Prognosis KW - Lymphatic Metastasis: diagnostic imaging KW - Lymph Nodes: pathology KW - Lymph Nodes: diagnostic imaging KW - Adult KW - Aged, 80 and over KW - Neoplasm Metastasis KW - Tumor Burden KW - Fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (Other) KW - Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (Other) KW - Oropharynx cancer (Other) KW - Total lesion glycolysis (Other) KW - Fluorodeoxyglucose F18 (NLM Chemicals) KW - Radiopharmaceuticals (NLM Chemicals) LB - PUB:(DE-HGF)16 C6 - pmid:39985091 C2 - pmc:PMC11844016 DO - DOI:10.1186/s40644-025-00836-6 UR - https://inrepo02.dkfz.de/record/299012 ER -