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BACKGROUND

Sarcopenia, or lean muscle loss, causes morbidity and early mortality in pediatric cancer patients and survivors. Sarcopenic patients who are also obese have a particularly morbid metabolic condition that cannot be identified by body mass index (BMI) alone. Temporalis muscle thickness (TMT) on T1-weighted MRI provides a direct assessment of lean muscle mass. In this study, we determined how TMT was associated with nutritional and survival outcomes in children with gliomas using an automated deep-learning pipeline that calculates TMT on MRI and provides age-and sex-specific TMT percentiles (iTMT).

METHODS

We analyzed a cohort of 343 patients and 1,673 scans (244 low-grade gliomas (LGG) and 99 high-grade gliomas (HGG)) diagnosed between 2000-2023 at Boston Children’s Hospital/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who had linked longitudinal MRI and clinical data available. We …