Prediction of preoperative microvascular invasion by dynamic radiomic analysis based on contrast-enhanced computed tomography

Purpose Microvascular invasion (MVI) is a common complication of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) surgery, which is an important predictor of reduced surgical prognosis. This study aimed to develop a fully automated diagnostic model to predict pre-surgical MVI based on four-phase dynamic CT images. Methods A total of 140 patients with HCC from two centers were retrospectively included (training set, n = 98; testing set, n = 42). All CT phases were aligned to the portal venous phase, and were then used to train a deep-learning model for liver tumor segmentation. Radiomics features were extracted from the tumor areas of original CT phases and pairwise subtraction images, as well as peritumoral features. Lastly, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models were trained based on clinical features, radiomics features, and hybrid features, respectively. Models were evaluated by area under curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values (PPV and NPV). Results Overall, 86 and 54 patients with MVI− (age, 55.92 ± 9.62 years; 68 men) and MVI+ (age, 53.59 ± 11.47 years; 43 men) were included. Average dice coefficients of liver tumor segmentation were 0.89 and 0.82 in training and testing sets, respectively. The model based on radiomics (AUC = 0.865, 95% CI: 0.725–0.951) showed slightly better performance than that based on clinical features (AUC = 0.841, 95% CI: 0.696–0.936). The classification model based on hybrid features achieved better performance in both training (AUC = 0.955, 95% CI: 0.893–0.987) and testing sets (AUC = 0.913, 95% CI: 0.785–0.978), compared with models based on clinical and radiomics features ( p -value < 0.05). Moreover, the hybrid model also provided the best accuracy (0.857), sensitivity (0.875), and NPV (0.917). Conclusion The classification model based on multimodal intra- and peri-tumoral radiomics features can well predict HCC patients with MVI. Graphical Abstract