White Matter Integrity of the Corticospinal Tract for Estimation of Individual Patient Risk for Postoperative Neurological Deterioration after Glioma Surgery.

BACKGROUND

Tractography has become a standard tool for planning neurosurgical operations and has been proven to be useful for risk stratification. In various conditions, tractography-derived white matter integrity has been shown to be associated with neurological outcome. Postoperative performance has been shown to be a prognostic marker in glioma. We aimed to assess the relation of preoperative corticospinal tract (CST) integrity with postoperative neurological deterioration in patients with malignant glioma.

METHODS

We retrospectively analyzed a cohort of 24 right-handed patients (41.7% female) for perioperative neurological performance score (NPS) and applied our anatomical tractography workflow to extract the median fractional anisotropy (FA) of the CST in preoperative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

RESULTS

Median FA of the CST ipsilateral to the tumor correlated significantly with preoperative NPS ( = 0.025). After rank order correlation and multivariate linear regression, we found that the preoperative median FA of the right CST correlates with preoperative NPS, independently from epidemiological data ( = 0.019). In patients with lesions of the right hemisphere, median FA of the right CST was associated with a declining NPS in multivariate linear regression ( = 0.024). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis revealed an optimal FA cutoff at 0.3946 in this subgroup (area under the curve 0.83). Patients below that cutoff suffered from a decline in neurological performance significantly more often ( = 0.020).

CONCLUSIONS

Assessment of preoperative white matter integrity may be a promising biomarker for risk estimation of patients undergoing craniotomy for resection of malignant glioma.