Radiomics signature for prediction of lateral lymph node metastasis in conventional papillary thyroid carcinoma

Abstract

Preoperative neck ultrasound (US) for lateral cervical lymph nodes is recommended for all patients undergoing thyroidectomy for thyroid malignancy, but it is operator dependent. We aimed to develop a radiomics signature using US images of the primary tumor to preoperatively predict lateral lymph node metastasis (LNM) in patients with conventional papillary thyroid carcinoma (cPTC). Methods Four hundred consecutive cPTC patients from January 2004 to February 2006 were enrolled as the training cohort, and 368 consecutive cPTC patients from March 2006 to February 2007 served as the validation cohort. A radiomics signature, which consisted of 14 selected features, was generated by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression model in the training cohort. The discriminating performance of the radiomics signature was assessed in the validation cohort with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Results The radiomics signature was significantly associated with lateral cervical lymph node status (p < 0.001). The AUC of its performance in discriminating metastatic and non-metastatic lateral cervical lymph nodes was 0.710 (95% CI: 0.649-0.770) in the training cohort and was 0.621 (95% CI: 0.560-0.682) in the validation cohort. Conclusions The present study showed that US radiomic features of the primary tumor were associated with lateral cervical lymph node status. Although their discriminatory performance was

Radiomics in Differentiated Thyroid Cancer and Nodules: Explorations, Application, and Limitations

“…This radiomic nomogram presented good discrimination in both training and validation datasets and may therefore have clinical application. More interestingly, one study found a link between ultrasound radiomic features of the primary tumor and the status of lateral LN metastasis [ 67 ]. The key and interesting part of this study was that it focused on the radiomics features of thyroid primary tumors in predicting lateral LN metastasis but not the LN itself, which may facilitate the early detection of metastases.…”

An Ultrasound Radiomics Nomogram for Preoperative Prediction of Central Neck Lymph Node Metastasis in Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma

“…Currently, this is mainly used the differentiation of malignant tumor from benign tumor in patients with thyroid diseases (47,62,64,65), and little is known about its application in the prediction of LN metastasis in patients with malignant thyroid tumors. Two studies investigated the prediction of whole cervical LN metastasis with radiomics (44,47), and one investigated the prediction of lateral cervical LN metastasis (25). No study has been conducted to investigate the prediction of central cervical LN metastasis.…”

“…It can not only quantitatively extract and analyze the features of US images, but also identify the tumor information from images that can't be macroscopically recognized (23,24). Available studies have revealed that radiomics can be used to predict the cervical LN metastasis in PTC patients (25). In our previous study, the PTC ultrasound images were extracted with radiomics method and then used for the prediction of cervical LN metastasis in the PTC patients (26).…”

Therapeutic Strategy in Low-Risk Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma – Long-Term Results of the First Single-Center Prospective Non-Randomized Trial Between 2011 and 2015

“…Therefore, the risk of recurrence resulting from natural tumor biology should be considered regardless of the extent of thyroid resection (46). Therefore, currently, more attention is paid to the possibility of selecting risk factors which allow for preoperative prediction of the risk of the metastases to the central lymph node compartment (47)(48)(49)(50)(51)(52) or the lateral cervical compartment (52)(53)(54)(55).…”