Objective: To examine whether the machine-learning approach using 18-fludeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (18F-FDG-PET)-based radiomic and deep-learning features is useful for predicting the pathological risk subtypes of thymic epithelial tumors (TETs).
Methods: This retrospective study included 79 TET [27 low-risk thymomas (types A, AB and B1), 31 high-risk thymomas (types B2 and B3) and 21 thymic carcinomas] patients who underwent pre-therapeutic 18F-FDG-PET/CT. High-risk TETs (high-risk thymomas and thymic carcinomas) were 52 patients. The 107 PET-based radiomic features, including SUV-related parameters [maximum SUV (SUVmax), metabolic tumor volume (MTV), and total lesion glycolysis (TLG)] and 1024 deep-learning features extracted from the convolutional neural network were used to predict the pathological risk subtypes of TETs using six different machine-learning algorithms. The area under the curves (AUCs) were calculated to compare the predictive performances.
Results: SUV-related parameters yielded the following AUCs for predicting thymic carcinomas: SUVmax 0.713, MTV 0.442, and TLG 0.479 or high-risk TETs: SUVmax 0.673, MTV 0.533, and TLG 0.539. The best-performing algorithm was the logistic regression model for predicting thymic carcinomas (AUC 0.900, accuracy 81.0%), and the random forest (RF) model for high-risk TETs (AUC 0.744, accuracy 72.2%). The AUC was significantly higher in the logistic regression model than three SUV-related parameters for predicting thymic carcinomas, and in the RF model than MTV and TLG for predicting high-risk TETs (each; p < 0.05).
Conclusion: 18F-FDG-PET-based radiomic analysis using a machine-learning approach may be useful for predicting the pathological risk subtypes of TETs.
Advances in knowledge: Machine-learning approach using 18F-FDG-PET-based radiomic features has the potential to predict the pathological risk subtypes of TETs.