Early postoperative CT as a prognostic biomarker in patients with advanced ovarian, tubal, and primary peritoneal cancer deemed optimally debulked at primary cytoreductive surgery

OBJECTIVE. The purpose of this article is to determine whether early postoperative CT provides prognostic information in patients with advanced ovarian, tubal, or primary peritoneal carcinoma with optimal debulking reported at primary cytoreduction. MATERIALS AND Met hods . Our study included 63 patients who underwent primary cytoreductive surgery for presumed advanced ovarian cancer, who had optimal debulking (residual disease ≤ 1 cm) reported at surgery, and who underwent CT before and 7-49 days after surgery. Two radiologists independently retrospectively interpreted all postoperative CT scans and scored lesions on a 5-point scale, where 1 indicates normal and 5 indicates definitely malignant. Lesions larger than 1 cm with a CT score of 4 or 5 were considered sub-optimally debulked residual disease. RESULTS. Suboptimally debulked residual disease on CT (range, 1.1-5.8 cm) was reported by reader 1 for 29 of 63 patients (46%) and by reader 2 for 31 of 63 patients (49%), with substantial interobserver agreement (κ = 0.75). Patients with suboptimally debulked residual disease on CT had significantly worse median progression-free survival (p = 0.001, both readers) and over-all survival (p ≤ 0.010, both readers). By univariate and multivariate analyses, suboptimally debulked residual disease on CT remained a significant independent predictor of progression-free survival (p = 0.001, both readers) and overall survival (p ≤ 0.006, both readers). CONCLUSION. Our study showed that residual disease larger than 1 cm was present on early postoperative CT in almost half of the patients deemed to have optimally debulked disease at primary cytoreduction. Residual disease larger than 1 cm detected on early postoperative CT was associated with significant decreases in both progression-free and overall survival.