Letter to the Editor re: Perfusion MRI for the prediction of treatment response after preoperative chemoradiotherapy in locally advanced rectal cancer

摘要

We congratulate Lim et al. [1] on their study investigating DCE-MRI and rectal cancer. In this well-performed and important study, the authors found that pretreatment K~(trans) was able to distinguish between res-ponders and non-responders to neoadjuvant chemoradia-tion in locally advanced, circumferential margin-threatened T3 tumours. Having performed a similar study, published in the same journal, Gollub et al. [2] did not find that pretreatment K~(trans) had predictive value, but rather that post-treatment K~(trans) in a select group of patients undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy only was able to distinguish pathological complete responders from incomplete responders.