Prognostic Evaluation Based on Dual-Time 18F-FDG PET/CT Radiomics Features in Patients with Locally Advanced Pancreatic Cancer Treated by Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy

Fei Wang; Chao Cheng; Shengnan Ren; Zhongyi Wu; Tao Wang; Xiaodong Yang; Changjing Zuo; Zhuangzhi Yan; Zhaobang Liu

doi:10.1155/2022/6528865

Prognostic Evaluation Based on Dual-Time ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT Radiomics Features in Patients with Locally Advanced Pancreatic Cancer Treated by Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy

J Oncol. 2022 Jul 14:2022:6528865. doi: 10.1155/2022/6528865. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Fei Wang^{1

2}, Chao Cheng³, Shengnan Ren³, Zhongyi Wu², Tao Wang³, Xiaodong Yang², Changjing Zuo³, Zhuangzhi Yan¹, Zhaobang Liu²

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Biomedical Engineering, School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China.
² Department of Medical Imaging, Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou 215163, China.
³ Department of Nuclear Medicine, Changhai Hospital, Naval Medical University, Shanghai 200433, China.

Abstract

Background: ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT is widely used in the prognosis evaluation of tumor patients. The radiomics features can provide additional information for clinical prognostic assessment.

Purpose: Purpose is to explore the prognostic value of radiomics features from dual-time ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT images for locally advanced pancreatic cancer (LAPC) patients treated with stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT).

Materials and methods: This retrospective study included 70 LAPC patients who received early and delayed ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT scans before SBRT treatment. A total of 1188 quantitative imaging features were extracted from dual-time PET/CT images. To avoid overfitting, the univariate analysis and elastic net were used to obtain a sparse set of image features that were applied to develop a radiomics score (Rad-score). Then, the Harrell consistency index (C-index) was used to evaluate the prognosis model.

Results: The Rad-score from dual-time images contains six features, including intensity histogram, morphological, and texture features. In the validation cohort, the univariate analysis showed that the Rad-score was the independent prognostic factor (p < 0.001, hazard ratio [HR]: 3.2). And in the multivariate analysis, the Rad-score was the only prognostic factor (p < 0.01, HR: 4.1) that was significantly associated with the overall survival (OS) of patients. In addition, according to cross-validation, the C-index of the prognosis model based on the Rad-score from dual-time images is better than the early and delayed images (0.720 vs. 0.683 vs. 0.583).

Conclusion: The Rad-score based on dual-time ¹⁸F-FDG PET/CT images is a promising noninvasive method with better prognostic value.