ABSTRACT
Objective:To evaluate the value of preoperative prediction of vessel invasion (VI) of locally advanced gastric cancer by machine learning model based on the venous phase enhanced CT radiomics features.Methods:A retrospective analysis of 296 patients with locally advanced gastric cancer confirmed by pathology in the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University from July 2011 to December 2020 was performed. The patients were divided into VI positive group ( n=213) and VI negative group ( n=83) based on pathological results. The data were divided into training set ( n=207) and test set ( n=89) according to the ratio of 7∶3 with stratification sampling. The clinical characteristics of patients were recorded, and the independent risk factors of gastric cancer VI were screened by multivariate logistic regression. Pyradiomics software was used to extract radiomic features from the venous phase enhanced CT images, and the minimum absolute shrinkage and selection algorithm (LASSO) was used to screen the features, obtain the optimal feature subset, and establish the radiomics signature. Four machine learning algorithms, including extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), logistic, naive Bayes (GNB), and support vector machine (SVM) models, were used to build prediction models for the radiomics signature and the screened clinical independent risk factors. The efficacy of the model in predicting gastric cancer VI was evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic curve. Results:The degree of differentiation (OR=13.651, 95%CI 7.265-25.650, P=0.003), Lauren′s classification (OR=1.349, 95%CI 1.011-1.799, P=0.042) and CA199 (OR=1.796, 95%CI 1.406-2.186, P=0.044) were independent risk factors for predicting the VI of locally advanced gastric cancer. Based on the venous phase enhanced CT images, 864 quantitative features were extracted, and 18 best constructed radiomics signature were selected by LASSO. In the training set, the area under the curve (AUC) of XGBoost, logistic, GNB and SVM models for predicting gastric cancer VI were 0.914 (95%CI 0.875-0.953), 0.897 (95%CI 0.853-0.940), 0.880 (95%CI 0.832-0.928) and 0.814 (95%CI 0.755-0.873), respectively, and in the test set were 0.870 (95%CI 0.769-0.971), 0.877 (95%CI 0.788-0.964), 0.859 (95%CI 0.755-0.961) and 0.773 (95%CI 0.647-0.898). The logistic model had the largest AUC in the test set. Conclusions:The machine learning model based on the venous phase enhanced CT radiomics features has high efficacy in predicting the VI of locally advanced gastric cancer before the operation, and the logistic model demonstrates the best diagnostic efficacy.