Research progress on prediction of lymph node metastasis in non-small cell lung cancer / 中华胸心血管外科杂志

ABSTRACT

Accurately predicting the risk of mediastinal lymph node metastasis before surgery is of great significance for tumor staging, treatment plan decision, and prognosis evaluation in patients with non-small cell lung cancer(NSCLC). Traditional imaging methods such as CT, MRI and PET/CT are currently the most commonly used clinical methods in clinical evaluation of lymph node status. However, it is subjective to judge lymph node metastasis only by the change of image morphological characteristics, and inflammatory lymphadenopathy will also lead to a high false positive rate. The clinicopathological characteristics obtained by analyzing the clinical data of patients with NSCLC can improve the accuracy of lymph node metastasis prediction to a certain extent. The clinical prediction model based on medical images combined with the clinical characteristics of patients can provide more intuitive and rational information for doctors and patients, but the performance and applicability of the model will inevitably decrease due to changes in disease risk factors and treatment measures. In recent years, with the significant improvement of image analysis technology and computing ability, radiomics models based on medical images can deeply dig into the data in radiological images for quantitative analysis, providing new ideas for predicting mediastinal lymph node metastasis in NSCLC patients, which has attracted extensive attention at home and abroad. This article reviews the progress and makes prospects of the above methods in the prediction of mediastinal lymph node metastasis in NSCLC.