We investigated the prognostic significance of radiomic features from 18F-FDG PET/CT to predict overall survival (OS) in patients with stage III NSCLC undergoing neoadjuvant chemoradiation therapy followed by surgery. We enrolled 300 patients with stage III NSCLC who underwent PET/CT at the initial work-up (PET1) and after neoadjuvant concurrent chemoradiotherapy (PET2). Radiomic primary tumor features were subjected to LASSO regression to select the most useful prognostic features of OS. The prognostic significance of the LASSO score and conventional PET parameters was assessed by Cox proportional hazards regression analysis. In conventional PET parameters, metabolic tumor volume (MTV) and total lesion glycolysis (TLG) of each PET1 and PET2 were significantly associated with OS. In addition, both the PET1-LASSO score and the PET2-LASSO score were significantly associated with OS. In multivariate Cox regression analysis, only the PET2-LASSO score was an independently significant factor for OS. The LASSO score showed better predictive performance for OS regarding the time-dependent receiver operating characteristic curve and decision curve analysis than conventional PET parameters. Radiomic features from PET/CT were an independent prognostic factor for the estimation of OS in stage III NSCLC. The newly developed LASSO score using radiomic features showed better prognostic results for individualized OS estimation than conventional PET parameters.
Keywords: 18F-FDG PET/CT; LASSO score; decision curve analysis; non-small cell lung cancer; overall survival; radiomics.