To determine the values of quantitative metrics derived from synthetic MRI (SyMRI) and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) in evaluating the prognostic factors of cervical carcinoma (CC).

In this prospective study, 74 patients with pathologically confirmed CC were enrolled. Pretreatment quantitative metrics including T1, T2 and ADC values were obtained from SyMRI and diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) sequences. The values of all metrics were compared for different prognostic features using Student’s t-test or Mann-Whitney U test. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and multivariate logistic regression analysis were utilized to evaluate the diagnostic performance of quantitative variables.

T1 and T2 values of parametrial involvement (PMI)-negative were significantly higher than those of PMI-positive (p = 0.002 and < 0.001), while ADC values did not show a significant difference. The area under curve (AUC) of T1 and T2 values for identifying PMI were 0.743 and 0.831. Only the T2 values showed a significant difference between the lymphovascular space involvement (LVSI)-negative and LVSI-positive (p < 0.001) and the AUC of T2 values for discriminating LVSI was 0.814. The differences of T1, T2 and ADC values between the well/moderately and the poorly differentiated CC were significant (all p < 0.001). The AUCs of T1, T2 and ADC values for predicting differentiation grades were 0.762, 0.830 and 0.808. The combined model of all metrics proved to achieve good diagnostic performance with the AUC of 0.866.

SyMRI may be a potential noninvasive tool for assessing the prognostic factors such as PMI, LVSI and differentiation grades in CC. Moreover, the overall diagnostic performances of synthetic quantitative metrics were superior to the ADC values, especially in identifying PMI and LVSI.

This is the first study to assess the utility of SyMRI-derived parameters and ADC value in evaluating the prognostic factors in CC.