Radiomics Study for Discriminating Second Primary Lung Cancers From Pulmonary Metastases in Pulmonary Solid Lesions

The objective of this study was to assess the value of quantitative radiomics features in discriminating second primary lung cancers (SPLCs) from pulmonary metastases (PMs).

This retrospective study enrolled 252 malignant pulmonary nodules with histopathologically confirmed SPLCs or PMs and randomly assigned them to a training or validation cohort. Clinical data were collected from the electronic medical records system. The imaging and radiomics features of each nodule were extracted from CT images.

A rad-score was generated from the training cohort using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression. A clinical and radiographic model was constructed using the clinical and imaging features selected by univariate and multivariate regression. A nomogram composed of clinical-radiographic factors and a rad-score were developed to validate the discriminative ability. The rad-scores differed significantly between the SPLC and PM groups. Sixteen radiomics features and four clinical-radiographic features were selected to build the final model to differentiate between SPLCs and PMs. The comprehensive clinical radiographic-radiomics model demonstrated good discriminative capacity with an area under the curve of the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.9421 and 0.9041 in the respective training and validation cohorts. The decision curve analysis demonstrated that the comprehensive model showed a higher clinical value than the model without the rad-score.

The proposed model based on clinical data, imaging features, and radiomics features could accurately discriminate SPLCs from PMs. The model thus has the potential to support clinicians in improving decision-making in a noninvasive manner.