Radiomic Feature Analysis for Distinguishing Solitary Pulmonary Capillary Hemangioma From Lepidic-Predominant Lung Adenocarcinoma in Ground Glass Lung Nodules

Abstract Solitary pulmonary capillary hemangioma (SPCH) is a benign lung tumor that presents as ground-glass nodules (GGN) on computed tomography (CT) images, mimicking lepidic-predominant adenocarcinoma (LPA). This study aimed to establish a discriminant model using a radiomic feature analysis to distinguish SPCH from LPA in lung GGNs. This study included 13 and 49 patients who underwent complete resection for lung SPCH and LPA, respectively. An SPCH/LPA classification model was proposed based on a two-level decision tree and 26 radiomic features extracted from each segmented lesion, including 5 and 21 features from the histogram and co-occurrence matrix, respectively. The two-level decision tree was constructed based on the training data with a support vector machine (SVM) as the classifier in each tree node. For comparison, a baseline model was built with the same 26 features using an SVM as the classifier. Both models were assessed by the leave-one-out cross-validation method. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of the proposed SPCH/LPA model were 0.954, 91.9%, 92.3%, and 91.8%. The proposed SPCH/LPA model significantly outperformed the baseline model (p<0.05). Our results may help surgeons to preoperatively discriminate SPCH from LPA, thus avoiding unnecessary surgery for benign tumors.