Intratumoral and peritumoral radiomics combined with computed tomography features for predicting the invasiveness of lung adenocarcinoma presenting as a subpleural ground-glass nodule with a consolidation-to-tumor ratio ≤50.

BACKGROUND

Preoperative accurate judgment of the degree of invasiveness in subpleural ground-glass lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) with a consolidation-to-tumor ratio (CTR) ≤50% is very important for the choice of surgical timing and planning. This study aims to investigate the performance of intratumoral and peritumoral radiomics combined with computed tomography (CT) features for predicting the invasiveness of LUAD presenting as a subpleural ground-glass nodule (GGN) with a CTR ≤50%.

METHODS

A total of 247 patients with LUAD from our hospital were randomly divided into two groups, i.e., the training cohort (n=173) and the internal validation cohort (n=74) (7:3 ratio). Furthermore, 47 patients from three other hospitals were collected as the external validation cohort. In the training cohort, the differences in clinical-radiological features were compared using univariate and multivariate analyses. The gross tumor volume (GTV) and gross peritumoral tumor volume (GPTV5, GPTV10, and GPTV15) radiomics models were constructed based on intratumoral and peritumoral (5, 10, and 15 mm) radiomics features. Additionally, the radscore of the best radiomics model and clinical risk factors were used to construct a combined model and the predictive efficacy of the model was evaluated in the validation cohorts. Finally, the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve and area under the curve (AUC) value were used to evaluate the discriminative ability of the model.

RESULTS

Tumor size and CTR were independent risk factors for predicting the invasiveness of LUAD. The GPTV10 model outperformed the other radiomics models, with AUC values of 0.910, 0.870, and 0.887 in the three cohorts. The AUC values of the combined model were 0.912, 0.874, and 0.892.

CONCLUSIONS

A nomogram based on GPTV10-radscore, tumor size, and CTR exhibited high predictive efficiency for predicting the invasiveness of LUAD.