A diagnosis model in nasopharyngeal carcinoma based on PET/MRI radiomics and semiquantitative parameters

Abstract

Background The staging of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is of great value in treatment and prognosis. We explored whether a positron emission tomography/ magnetic resonance imaging (PET/MRI) based comprehensive model of radiomics features and semiquantitative parameters was useful for clinical evaluation of NPC staging. Materials and methods A total of 100 NPC patients diagnosed with non-keratinized undifferentiated carcinoma were divided into early-stage group (I—II) and advanced-stage group (III—IV) and divided into the training set (n = 70) and the testing set (n = 30). Radiomics features (n = 396 × 2) of the primary site of NPC were extracted from MRI and PET images, respectively. Three major semiquantitative parameters of primary sites including maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax), metabolic tumor volume (MTV), and total lesion glycolysis (TLG) in all NPC patients were measured. After feature selection, three diagnostic models including the radiomics model, the metabolic parameter model, and the combined model were established using logistic regression model. Finally, internal validation was performed, and a nomogram for NPC comprehensive diagnosis has been made. Results The radiomics model and metabolic parameter model showed an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.83 and 0.80 in the testing set, respectively. The combined model based on radiomics and semiquantitative parameters showed an AUC of 0.90 in the testing set, with the best performance among the three models. Conclusion The combined model based on PET/MRI radiomics and semiquantitative parameters is of great value in the evaluation of clinical stage (early-stage group and advanced-stage group) of NPC.

The Utility of 18F-FDG-PET–CT Metabolic Parameters in Evaluating the Primary Tumor Aggressiveness and Lymph Node Metastasis of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

“…In fact, comprehensive imaging is generally used to stage NPC in clinical practice, but when the disease (primary or metastatic) is in a critical state, clinical staging based on imaging involves certain difficulties. A study by Feng et al 41 showed that a model based on PET and MRI features (1 T2WI feature and 11 PET features) and metabolic parameters (primary tumor SUV max and TLG) exhibited good diagnostic performance for predicting NPC staging in the testing set (AUC, 0.90). Our study retrospectively analyzed the association between various PET–CT metabolic parameters and T and N staging, which may provide novel directions for clinical work and prove helpful for clinicians.…”

Utility of CT Radiomics and Delta Radiomics for Survival Evaluation in Locally Advanced Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma with Concurrent Chemoradiotherapy

“…Delta radiomics refers to a branch of radiomics focused on the analysis of changes in radiomic features over time [20]. Specifically, delta radiomics involves comparing these features across different time points to assess changes that occur in response to treatment or disease progression [21][22][23]. This approach can provide insights into how the tumor is responding to treatment, potentially even before changes are visible to the naked eye or through standard imaging assessments.…”

Comprehensive evaluation of similarity between synthetic and real CT images for nasopharyngeal carcinoma

“…Recent studies proved that multi-modality images were signi cant for radiomic. Combining the feature of radiomic from the different images, such as CT, MRI and PET, would improve the prognostic performance for clinical application [21,22].This study was to perform a comprehensive evaluation in terms of image quality metrics (IQMs) and radiomic features for different image modalities scenarios. A clear understanding of the similarity of image details can facilitate the improvement of synthetic images and wide clinical applications.…”