A meta-analysis of MRI-based radiomic features for predicting lymph node metastasis in patients with cervical cancer

•Using MRI-based radiomic features can help improve the accuracy of predicting lymph node metastasis in cervical cancer patients.•Radiomics combined with clinical factors exhibited a high diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) of 18.93.•Of four types of sequence(T2WI + DWI + DCE, T2WI + DCE, T2WI, ADC), multiple sequences(T2WI + DWI + DCE) performed best (DOR = 15.49 vs. 7.63, 8.31, and 4.93) in discriminating LNM and non-LNM in cervical cancer.•Despite the good predictive power of radiomics, the overall quality of theselected studies needs to be improved.