Gastric cancer remains one of the most prevalent and fatal malignancies in China. Peritoneal metastasis represents a frequent mode of dissemination or recurrence in patients with advanced disease and confers an extremely poor prognosis. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in imaging techniques, with modalities including CT, ultrasound, MRI and PET-CT being implemented to evaluate peritoneal metastasis. However, adequate detection remains challenging, particularly for occult peritoneal metastasis. With the advent of precision medicine, radiomics and artificial intelligence have undergone rapid development and show considerable promise for the early prediction of peritoneal metastasis in gastric cancer, providing a new means of diagnosis and treatment for patients with peritoneal metastasis.
Biliary tract cancer is characterized by occult onset, highly malignancy and poor prognosis. Traditional medical imaging is an important tool for surgical strategies and prognostic assessment, but it can no longer meet the urgent need for accurate and individualized treatment in patients with biliary tract cancer. With the advent of the digital imaging era, the advancement of artificial intelligence technology has given a new vitality to digital imaging, and provided more possibilities for the development of medical imaging in clinical applications. The application of radiomics in the diagnosis and differential diagnosis of benign and malignant tumors of biliary tract, assessment of lymph node status, early recurrence and prognosis assessment provides new means for the diagnosis and treatment of patients with biliary tract cancer.
Objective To predict the lymph node metastasis status of patients with invasive pulmonary adenocarcinoma by constructing machine learning models based on primary tumor radiomics, peritumoral radiomics, and habitat radiomics, and to evaluate the predictive performance and generalization ability of different imaging features. Methods A retrospective analysis was performed on the clinical data of 1 263 patients with invasive pulmonary adenocarcinoma who underwent surgery at the Department of Thoracic Surgery, Jiangsu Province Hospital, from 2016 to 2019. Habitat regions were delineated by applying K-means clustering (average cluster number of 2) to the grayscale values of CT images. The peritumoral region was defined as a uniformly expanded area of 3 mm around the primary tumor. The primary tumor region was automatically segmented using V-net combined with manual correction and annotation. Subsequently, radiomics features were extracted based on these regions, and stacked machine learning models were constructed. Model performance was evaluated on the training, testing, and internal validation sets using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), F1 score, recall, and precision. Results After excluding patients who did not meet the screening criteria, a total of 651 patients were included. The training set consisted of 468 patients (181 males, 287 females) with an average age of (58.39±11.23) years, ranging from 29 to 78 years, the testing set included 140 patients (56 males, 84 females) with an average age of (58.81±10.70) years, ranging from 34 to 82 years, and the internal validation set comprised 43 patients (14 males, 29 females) with an average age of (60.16±10.68) years, ranging from 29 to 78 years. Although the habitat radiomics model did not show the optimal performance in the training set, it exhibited superior performance in the internal validation set, with an AUC of 0.952 [95%CI (0.87, 1.00)], an F1 score of 84.62%, and a precision-recall AUC of 0.892, outperforming the models based on the primary tumor and peritumoral regions. ConclusionThe model constructed based on habitat radiomics demonstrated superior performance in the internal validation set, suggesting its potential for better generalization ability and clinical application in predicting lymph node metastasis status in pulmonary adenocarcinoma.
This study aims to predict expression of estrogen receptor (ER) in breast cancer by radiomics. Firstly, breast cancer images are segmented automatically by phase-based active contour (PBAC) method. Secondly, high-throughput features of ultrasound images are extracted and quantized. A total of 404 high-throughput features are divided into three categories, such as morphology, texture and wavelet. Then, the features are selected by R language and genetic algorithm combining minimum-redundancy-maximum-relevance (mRMR) criterion. Finally, support vector machine (SVM) and AdaBoost are used as classifiers, achieving the goal of predicting ER by breast ultrasound image. One hundred and four cases of breast cancer patients were conducted in the experiment and optimal indicator was obtained using AdaBoost. The prediction accuracy of molecular marker ER could achieve 75.96% and the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 79.39%. According to the results of experiment, the feasibility of predicting expression of ER in breast cancer using radiomics was verified.
The widespread application of low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) has significantly increased the detection of pulmonary small nodules, while accurate prediction of their growth patterns is crucial to avoid overdiagnosis or underdiagnosis. This article reviews recent research advances in predicting pulmonary nodule growth based on CT imaging, with a focus on summarizing key factors influencing nodule growth, such as baseline morphological parameters, dynamic indicators, and clinical characteristics, traditional prediction models (exponential and Gompertzian models), and the applications and limitations of radiomics-based and deep learning models. Although existing studies have achieved certain progress in predicting nodule growth, challenges such as small sample sizes and lack of external validation persist. Future research should prioritize the development of personalized and visualized prediction models integrated with larger-scale datasets to enhance predictive accuracy and clinical applicability.
Lung cancer is a malignant tumor with the highest mortality worldwide, and its early diagnosis and evaluation have a crucial impact on the comprehensive treatment of patients. Early preoperative diagnosis of lung cancer depends on a variety of imaging and tumor marker indicators, but it cannot be accurately assessed due to its high false positive rate. Liquid biopsy biomarkers can detect circulating tumor cells and DNA in peripheral blood by non-invasive methods and are gradually becoming a powerful diagnostic tool in the field of precision medicine for tumors. This article reviews the research progress of liquid biopsy biomarkers and their combination with clinical imaging features in the early diagnosis of lung cancer.
In order to solve the pathological grading of hepatocellular carcinomas (HCC) which depends on biopsy or surgical pathology invasively, a quantitative analysis method based on radiomics signature was proposed for pathological grading of HCC in non-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images. The MRI images were integrated to predict clinical outcomes using 328 radiomics features, quantifying tumour image intensity, shape and text, which are extracted from lesion by manual segmentation. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) were used to select the most-predictive radiomics features for the pathological grading. A radiomics signature, a clinical model, and a combined model were built. The association between the radiomics signature and HCC grading was explored. This quantitative analysis method was validated in 170 consecutive patients (training dataset: n = 125; validation dataset, n = 45), and cross-validation with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was performed and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) was employed as the prediction metric. Through the proposed method, AUC was 0.909 in training dataset and 0.800 in validation dataset, respectively. Overall, the prediction performances by radiomics features showed statistically significant correlations with pathological grading. The results showed that radiomics signature was developed to be a significant predictor for HCC pathological grading, which may serve as a noninvasive complementary tool for clinical doctors in determining the prognosis and therapeutic strategy for HCC.
This study aims to predict expression of Ki67 molecular marker in pancreatic cystic neoplasm using radiomics. We firstly manually segmented tumor area in multi-detector computed tomography (MDCT) images. Then 409 high-throughput features were automatically extracted and the least absolute shrinkage selection operator (LASSO) regression model was used for feature selection. After 200 bootstrapping repetitions of LASSO, 20 most frequently selected features made up the optimal feature set. Then 200 bootstrapping repetitions of support vector machine (SVM) classifier with 10-fold cross-validation were used to avoid overfitting and accurately predict the Ki67 expression. The highest prediction accuracy could achieve 85.29% and the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 91.54% with a sensitivity (SENS) of 81.88% and a specificity (SPEC) of 86.75%. According to the results of experiment, the feasibility of predicting expression of Ki67 in pancreatic cystic neoplasm based on radiomics was verified.
Objective To construct a radiomics model for identifying clinical high-risk carotid plaques. Methods A retrospective analysis was conducted on patients with carotid artery stenosis in China-Japan Friendship Hospital from December 2016 to June 2022. The patients were classified as a clinical high-risk carotid plaque group and a clinical low-risk carotid plaque group according to the occurrence of stroke, transient ischemic attack and other cerebrovascular clinical symptoms within six months. Six machine learning models including eXtreme Gradient Boosting, support vector machine, Gaussian Naive Bayesian, logical regression, K-nearest neighbors and artificial neural network were established. We also constructed a joint predictive model combined with logistic regression analysis of clinical risk factors. ResultsFinally 652 patients were collected, including 427 males and 225 females, with an average age of 68.2 years. The results showed that the prediction ability of eXtreme Gradient Boosting was the best among the six machine learning models, and the area under the curve (AUC) in validation dataset was 0.751. At the same time, the AUC of eXtreme Gradient Boosting joint prediction model established by clinical data and carotid artery imaging data validation dataset was 0.823. Conclusion Radiomics features combined with clinical feature model can effectively identify clinical high-risk carotid plaques.
ObjectiveTo explore the utility of machine learning-based radiomics models for risk stratification of severe asymptomatic carotid stenosis (ACS). MethodsThe clinical data and head and neck CT angiography images of 188 patients with severe carotid artery stenosis at the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, China-Japan Friendship Hospital from 2017 to 2021 were retrospectively collected. The patients were randomly divided into a training set (n=131, including 107 males and 24 females aged 68±8 years), and a validation set (n=57, including 50 males and 7 females aged 67±8 years). The volume of interest was manually outlined layer by layer along the edge of the carotid plaque on cross-section. Radiomics features were extracted using the Pyradiomics package of Python software. Intraclass and interclass correlation coefficient analysis, redundancy analysis, and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression analysis were used for feature selection. The selected radiomics features were constructed into a predictive model using 6 different supervised machine learning algorithms: logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, support vector machine, naive Bayes, and K nearest neighbor. The diagnostic efficacy of each prediction model was compared using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and the area under the curve (AUC), which were validated in the validation set. Calibration and clinical usefulness of the prediction model were evaluated using calibration curve and decision curve analysis (DCA). ResultsFour radiomics features were finally selected based on the training set for the construction of a predictive model. Among the 6 machine learning models, the logistic regression model exhibited higher and more stable diagnostic efficacy, with an AUC of 0.872, a sensitivity of 100.0%, and a specificity of 66.2% in the training set; the AUC, sensitivity and specificity in the validation set were 0.867, 83.3% and 78.8%, respectively. The calibration curve and DCA showed that the logistic regression model had good calibration and clinical usefulness. ConclusionThe machine learning-based radiomics model shows application value in the risk stratification of patients with severe ACS.