Abstract: Objective The aim of this study was to investigate the clinical value of enhanced CT texture analysis technique in predicting short-term recurrence of liver tumor in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) aftertranscatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE). Methods 70 patients with unresectable HCC were recruited between November 2016 and November 2019, and all of them received TACE and enhanced CT scanning for follow-up. The tumor boundary was drawn layer by layer on the enhanced CT axial image by texture analysis technology, and the mean, entropy, skewness, kurtosis, and nonuniformity were obtained. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC)curve (AUROC) was applied to analyze the predictive value of the above texture analysis parameters for the risk of short-term recurrence of tumors after TACE. Results The tumor showed short-term recurrence in 40 cases, and non-short-term recurrence in 30 cases in our series; the mean of CT texture in patients with short-term tumor recurrence was 20553.8±4094.5, significantly lower than (23407.3±4634.3, P<0.05) in patients without; the entropy and unevenness were 4.2±0.3 and 0.26±0.12, significantly higher than in patients without, while there were no significant differences in skewness and kurtosis between the two groups (P>0.05); the ROC curve analysis showed that the mean, entropy and nonuniformity had certain predictive value for the risk of short-term tumor recurrence after TACE, with the AUC of 0.785, 0.694 and 0.761, respectively. Conclusion The enhanced CT texture analysis technique has an important predictive value for the risk of short-term tumor recurrence in patients with HCC after TACE, which needs further investigation.

Key words: Hepatoma, enhanced CT texture technique, Transcatheter arterial chemoembolization, Tumor recurrence