The histopathological growth patterns (HGPs) of liver metastases of colorectal cancer and of several other tumor types predict outcome of patients in multiple studies. The HGPs of liver metastases have a prognostic but also a predictive value with one of the growth patterns, the replacement growth pattern, related to resistance to systemic treatment. Given that the HGP can only be assessed in a reliable manner when a surgical resection of the metastasis has been performed, this biomarker cannot be exploited to the full. For example, HGPs can at this moment, not be used to decide whether patients with liver metastatic breast or colorectal cancer will benefit or not from locoregional treatment, such as surgery or radiotherapy, and from peri-operative systemic treatment.

In this review we highlight studies that suggest that the HGPs of liver metastases can be identified by medical imaging. Although still to be confirmed by a prospective multicenter approach, some studies indeed achieve a high accuracy in predicting the HGPs by applying radiomic algorithms on CT- or MR-images of liver metastases. This is an important step towards a treatment planning of patients with liver metastatic cancer that takes into account the biology and the progression kinetics of the metastases.

在多项研究中，结直肠癌肝转移瘤和其他几种肿瘤类型的组织病理学生长模式 (HGP) 可预测患者的预后。肝转移瘤的 HGP 具有预后价值，但也具有预测价值，其中一种生长模式，即替代生长模式，与对全身治疗的抗性有关。鉴于只有在手术切除转移灶后才能以可靠的方式评估 HGP，因此无法充分利用该生物标志物。例如，目前 HGP 不能用于决定肝转移性乳腺癌或结直肠癌患者是否会从局部治疗（如手术或放疗）以及围手术期全身治疗中受益。

在这篇综述中，我们重点介绍了表明肝转移灶的 HGP 可以通过医学成像识别的研究。尽管仍有待前瞻性多中心方法证实，但一些研究确实通过在肝转移瘤的 CT 或 MR 图像上应用放射组学算法在预测 HGP 方面实现了高精度。这是考虑到转移的生物学和进展动力学的肝转移癌患者的治疗计划的重要一步。