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.

Solitary Pulmonary Capillary Hemangioma: CT and PET-CT Features with Clinicopathologic Correlation

“…Indeed, the initial radiologic diagnoses of all SPCHs in our study were lung adenocarcinomas. The clinical value of distinguishing SPCH from lung adenocarcinoma has also been recognized by a recent preliminary report that introduced a discriminant model based on radiomics features [ 16 ]. However, this study is limited in that the radiomic features were extracted from only 13 cases of SPCH [ 16 ].…”

“…The clinical value of distinguishing SPCH from lung adenocarcinoma has also been recognized by a recent preliminary report that introduced a discriminant model based on radiomics features [ 16 ]. However, this study is limited in that the radiomic features were extracted from only 13 cases of SPCH [ 16 ]. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to provide detailed analyses of the imaging features of SPCH with pathologic correlation.…”

“…However, in these studies, SPCH was merely described as a subsolid nodule by focusing only on nodule attenuation [ 4 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ], and detailed imaging features have not been described. A recent preliminary study tried to distinguish SPCH from lung adenocarcinoma with radiomic features, but the study has limitations due to its small sample size [ 16 ].…”