Objectives: In this multicenter study, we sought to develop and validate a preoperative model for predicting early recurrence (ER) risk after curative resection of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) through artificial intelligence (AI)-based CT radiomics approach.
Materials and methods: A total of 311 patients (Derivation: 160; Internal and two external validations: 36, 74 and 61) from 8 medical centers who underwent curative resection were collected retrospectively. In derivation cohort, radiomics and clinical-radiomics models for ER prediction were constructed by LightGBM (a machine learning algorithm). A clinical model was also developed for comparison. Model performance was validated in internal and two external cohorts by ROC. In addition, we investigated the interpretability of the LightGBM model.
Results: The combined clinical-radiomics model that included 15 radiomic features and 3 clinical features (CA19-9 > 1000 U/ml, vascular invasion and tumor margin), resulting in the area under the curves (AUCs) of 0.974 (95% CI 0.946-1.000) in the derivation cohort, and 0.871-0.882 (95% CI 0.672-0.962) in the internal and external validation cohorts, respectively, which are higher than the AJCC 8th TNM staging system (AUCs: 0.686-0.717, p all < 0.05). Especially, the sensitivity of this machine learning model could reach 94.6% on average for all the cohorts.
Conclusions: This AI-driven combined radiomics model may provide as a useful tool to preoperatively predict ER and improve therapeutic management of ICC patients.
Keywords: Biliary tract cancer; CT; Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma; LightGBM; Machine learning; Multicenter study; Prediction model; Radiomics; Recurrence; Recurrence-free survival.
© 2023. Asian Pacific Association for the Study of the Liver.