Radiomics for Classification of Lung Cancer Histological Subtypes Based on Nonenhanced Computed Tomography

Objectives: To evaluate the performance of using radiomics method to classify lung cancer histological subtypes based on nonenhanced computed tomography images.

Materials And Methods: 278 patients with pathologically confirmed lung cancer were collected, including 181 nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and 97 small cell lung cancers (SCLC) patients. Among the NSCLC patients, 88 patients were adenocarcinomas (AD) and 93 patients were squamous cell carcinomas (SCC). In total, 1695 quantitative radiomic features (QRF) were calculated from the primary lung cancer tumor in each patient. To build radiomic classification model based on the extracted QRFs, several machine-learning algorithms were applied sequentially. First, unsupervised hierarchical clustering was used to exclude highly correlated QRFs; second, the minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance feature selection algorithm was employed to select informative and nonredundant QRFs; finally, the Incremental Forward Search and Support Vector Machine classification algorithms were used to combine the selected QRFs and build the model. In our work, to study the phenotypic differences among lung cancer histological subtypes, four classification models were built. They were models of SCLC vs NSCLC, SCLC vs AD, SCLC vs SCC, and AD vs SCC. The performance of the classification models was evaluated by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) estimated by three-fold cross-validation.

Results: The AUC (95% confidence interval) for the model of SCLC vs NSCLC was 0.741(0.678, 0.795). For the models of SCLC vs AD and SCLC vs SCC, the AUCs were 0.822(0.755, 0.875) and 0.665(0.583, 0.738), respectively. The AUC for the model of AD vs SCC was 0.655(0.570, 0.731). Several QRFs ("Law_15," "LoG_Uniformity," "GLCM_Contrast," and "Compactness Factor") that characterize tumor heterogeneity and shape were selected as the significant features to build the models.

Conclusion: Our results show that phenotypic differences exist among different lung cancer histological subtypes on nonenhanced computed tomography image.