Prediction of the Depth of Tumor Invasion in Gastric Cancer: Potential Role of CT Radiomics

Rationale And Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the value of computed tomography (CT) radiomics for the differentiation between T2 and T3/4 stage lesions in gastric cancer.

Materials And Methods: A total of 244 consecutive patients with pathologically proven gastric cancer were retrospectively included and split into a training cohort (171 patients) and a test cohort (73 patients). Preoperative arterial phase and portal phase contrast enhanced CT images were retrieved for tumor segmentation and feature extraction by using a dedicated postprocessing software. The random forest method was used to build the classifier models.

Results: The performance of single phase radiomics models were favorable in the differentiation between T2 and T3/4 stage tumors. Arterial phase-based radiomics model exhibited areas under the curve of 0.899 (95% CI: 0.812-0.955) in the training cohort and 0.825 (95% CI: 0.718-0.904) in the test cohort. Portal phase-based radiomics model showed areas under the curve of 0.843 (95% CI: 0.746-0.914) and 0.818 (95% CI: 0.711-0.899) in the training and test cohort, respectively.

Conclusion: CT radiomics approach has a potential role in differentiation between T2 and T3/4 stage tumors in gastric cancer.