CT-based peritumoral radiomics signatures for malignancy grading of clear cell renal cell carcinoma

To evaluate the efficiency of CT-based peritumoral radiomics signatures of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) for malignancy grading in preoperative prediction.

203 patients with pathologically confirmed as ccRCC were retrospectively enrolled in this study. All patients were categorized into training set (n = 122) and validation set (n = 81). For each patient, two types of volumes of interest (VOI) were masked on CT images. One type of VOIs was defined as the tumor mass volume (TMV), which was masked by radiologists delineating the outline of all contiguous slices of the entire tumor, while the other type defined as the peritumoral tumor volume (PTV), which was automatically created by an image morphological method. 1760 radiomics features were calculated from each VOI, and then the discriminative radiomics features were selected by Pearson correlation analysis for reproducibility and redundancy. These selected features were investigated their validity for building radiomics signatures by mRMR feature ranking method. Finally, the top ranked features, which were used as radiomics signatures, were input into a classifier for malignancy grading. The prediction performance was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve in an independent validation cohort.

The radiomics signatures of PTV showed a better performance on malignancy grade prediction of ccRCC with AUC of 0.807 (95% CI 0.800–0.834) in train data and 0.848 (95% CI 0.760–0.936) in validation data, while the radiomics signatures of TMV with AUC of 0.773 (95% CI 0.744–0.802) in train data and 0.810 (95% CI 0.706–0.914) in validation data.

The CT-based peritumoral radiomics signature is a potential way to be used as a noninvasive tool to preoperatively predict the malignancy grades of ccRCC.