Discovery and Validation of a CT-Based Radiomic Signature for Preoperative Prediction of Early Recurrence in Hypopharyngeal Carcinoma

Purpose: In the clinical management of hypopharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (HSCC), preoperative identification of early recurrence (≤2 years) after curative resection is essential. Thus, we aimed to develop a CT-based radiomic signature to predict early recurrence in HSCC patients preoperatively.

Methods: In total, 167 HSCC patients who underwent partial surgery were enrolled in this retrospective study and divided into two groups, i.e., the training cohort ( = 133) and the validation cohort ( = 34). Each individual was followed up for at least for 2 years. Radiomic features were extracted from CT images, and the radiomic signature was built with the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) logistic regression (LR) model. The associations of preoperative clinical factors with early recurrence were evaluated. A radiomic signature-combined model was built, and the area under the curve (AUC) was used to explore their performance in discriminating early recurrence.

Results: Among the 1415 features, 335 of them were selected using the variance threshold method. Then, the SelectKBest method was further used for the selection of 31 candidate features. Finally, 11 out of 31 optimal features were identified with the LASSO algorithm. In the LR classifier, the AUCs of the training and validation sets in discriminating early recurrence were 0.83 (95% CI: 0.76-0.90) (sensitivity 0.8 and specificity 0.83) and 0.83 (95% CI: 0.67-0.99) (sensitivity 0.69 and specificity 0.71), respectively.

Conclusions: Using the radiomic signature, we developed a radiomic signature to preoperatively predict early recurrence in patients with HSCC, which may serve as a potential noninvasive tool to guide personalized treatment.