The assessment of immature microvascular density in brain gliomas with dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging

Highlights: • It is very important to evaluate glioma immature microvessel in a noninvasive manner for clinical practice. • In this work, we evaluated the immature microvascular density (MVD) in brain gliomas by comparing with dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) and CD105 positive MVD. • Our study provided a direct histologic microvascular that correlated with DCE-MRI, which may help to support the alternative hypothesis that DCE-MRI can assess the malignant and immature microvessels within gliomas. • Specifically, we validated the hypothesis that DCE-MRI could reflect immature MVD within gliomas. - Abstract: Purpose: This study was designed to quantitatively evaluate the immature microvascular density (MVD) of brain gliomas using the volume transfer constant (K^trans) and volume of extravascular extracellular space per unit volume of tissue (V_e) from dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) noninvasively. Materials and methods: Fifty-seven patients (35 males, 22 females; age range, 14–70, mean age 46 ± 12 years old) with brain glioma were included in this study. The maximal values of K^trans and V_e of all patients with brain glioma (grade II 24, III 7 and IV 26) were obtained. The CD105-microvascular density (CD105-MVD) of each tumor was measured in surgical specimen. The differences of K^trans, V_e and CD105-MVD between the different grades of gliomas were analyzed using the Mann–Whitney U-test. The Pearman correlation coefficient was determined between K^trans, V_e and CD105-MVD. A P-value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: The differences in K^trans, V_e and CD105-MVD were statistically significant between low-grade glioma (LGG) and high-grade glioma (HGG) (P = 0.001, P < 0.001, P < 0.001). The K^trans, V_e and CD105-MVD of grade II were significantly lower than those of grade III and IV. K^trans and V_e were positively correlated with CD105-MVD in HGG (P < 0.001, P < 0.001). Conclusions: Our results suggest DCE-MRI plays an important part in noninvasively evaluating the immature MVD of brain gliomas