Preoperative Prediction of Lymphovascular Space Invasion in Cervical Cancer With Radiomics -Based Nomogram

Purpose: To build and evaluate a radiomics-based nomogram that improves the predictive performance of the LVSI in cervical cancer non-invasively before the operation.

Method: This study involved 149 patients who underwent surgery with cervical cancer from February 2017 to October 2019. Radiomics features were extracted from T2 weighted imaging (T2WI). The radiomic features were selected by logistic regression with the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) penalty in the training cohort. Based on the selected features, support vector machine (SVM) algorithm was used to build the radiomics signature on the training cohort. Incorporating radiomics signature and clinical risk factors, the radiomics-based nomogram was developed. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and area under the curve (AUC) and Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve were calculated to assess these models.

Result: The radiomics model performed much better than the clinical model in both training (AUCs 0.925 0.786, accuracies 87.5% 70.5%, sensitivities 83.6% 41.7% and specificities 90.9% 94.7%) and testing (AUCs 0.911 0.706, accuracies 84.0% 71.3%, sensitivities 81.1% 43.4% and specificities 86.4% 95.0%). The combined model based on the radiomics signature and tumor stage, tumor infiltration depth and tumor pathology yielded the best performance (training cohort, AUC = 0.943, accuracies 89.5%, sensitivities 85.4% and specificities 92.9%; testing cohort, AUC = 0.923, accuracies 84.6%, sensitivities 84.0% and specificities 85.1%).

Conclusion: Radiomics-based nomogram was a useful tool for predicting LVSI of cervical cancer. This would aid the selection of the optimal therapeutic strategy and clinical decision-making for individuals.