Imaging-Based Disease Assessment and Management Recommendations: Impact of Multidisciplinary Sarcoma Tumor Board.

Simple Summary: Sarcomas are a heterogeneous group of tumors that arise from mesenchymal tissue, including adipose, bone, cartilage, skeletal muscle, and smooth muscle. Because of their rarity, optimal treatment planning requires discussion among sarcoma-experienced subspecialists. Studies have shown that treatment guided by multidisciplinary tumor boards (MTBs) is associated with better compliance with clinical practice guidelines and, in some cases, increased survival. The role of radiologists in the MTB setting is valuable in assessing disease in patients with sarcoma; however, radiologists' recommendations may differ from the MTB's consensus. This study highlights the discordance between the disease assessment and the clinical recommendations provided by radiologists and MTBs and encourages all radiologists caring for patients with sarcoma to participate in MTBs to best align their interpretations with optimal clinical management and make multidisciplinary aligned recommendations whenever feasible. Multidisciplinary tumor boards (MTBs) facilitate decision-making among subspecialists in the care of oncology patients, but the mechanisms by which they enhance outcomes remain incompletely understood. Our aim was to measure the agreement between sarcoma MTBs and radiology reports' disease assessment and management recommendations. This single-center IRB-approved retrospective study evaluated cases presented at a weekly sarcoma MTB from 1 August 2020 to 31 July 2021. Cases without clinical notes, imaging studies, or radiology reports were excluded. The data collected included the patient's clinical status at the time of the MTB, the treatment response assessment by the MTB and radiologists (stable disease; partial response; complete response; progressive disease/recurrence), and the recommendations of the radiology reports and of the MTB. The agreement between the initial radiologist review and MTB on disease assessment and recommendations was analyzed using kappa statistics. In total, 283 cases met the inclusion criteria. Radiology reports provided recommendations in 34.3% of cases, which were adhered to by the ordering providers in 73.2% of cases. The agreement between MTBs and radiology reports was moderate in disease assessment (86.2% agreement; κ = 0.78; p < 0.0001) and negligible in recommendations (36% agreement; κ = 0.18; p < 0.0001). Radiologists were more likely to assign progressive disease/recurrence than MTBs (54.4% vs. 44.4%; p < 0.001) and to recommend short-term imaging follow-up more commonly than MTBs (46.4% vs. 21.7%; p < 0.001). At a tertiary care center, radiologists' isolated interpretations of imaging findings and management recommendations frequently differ from the MTB's consensus, reflecting the value of multidisciplinary discussions incorporating the patient's clinical status and the available treatment options into the final radiographic assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]