Identification of pulmonary adenocarcinoma and benign lesions in isolated solid lung nodules based on a nomogram of intranodal and perinodal CT radiomic features

Abstract

To develop and validate a predictive model based on clinical radiology and radiomics to enhance the ability to distinguish between benign and malignant solitary solid pulmonary nodules. In this study, we retrospectively collected computed tomography (CT) images and clinical data of 286 patients with isolated solid pulmonary nodules diagnosed by surgical pathology, including 155 peripheral adenocarcinomas and 131 benign nodules. They were randomly divided into a training set and verification set at a 7:3 ratio, and 851 radiomic features were extracted from thin-layer enhanced venous phase CT images by outlining intranodal and perinodal regions of interest. We conducted preprocessing measures of image resampling and eigenvalue normalization. The minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (lasso) methods were used to downscale and select features. At the same time, univariate and multifactorial analyses were performed to screen clinical radiology features. Finally, we constructed a nomogram based on clinical radiology, intranodular, and perinodular radiomics features. Model performance was assessed by calculating the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), and the clinical decision curve (DCA) was used to evaluate the clinical practicability of the models. Univariate and multivariate analyses showed that the two clinical factors of sex and age were statistically significant. Lasso screened four intranodal and four perinodal radiomic features. The nomogram based on clinical radiology, intranodular, and perinodular radiomics features showed the best predictive performance (AUC=0.95, accuracy=0.89, sensitivity=0.83, specificity=0.96), which was superior to other independent models. A nomogram based on clinical radiology, intranodular, and perinodular radiomics features is helpful to improve the ability to predict benign and malignant solitary pulmonary nodules.