Development and Validation of a CT-Based Radiomics Nomogram for Predicting Postoperative Progression-Free Survival in...

Many patients experience recurrence of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) after radical and partial nephrectomy. Radiomics nomogram is a newly used noninvasive tool that could predict tumor phenotypes.

To investigate Radiomics Features (RFs) associated with progression-free survival (PFS) of RCC, assessing its incremental value over clinical factors, and to develop a visual nomogram in order to provide reference for individualized treatment.

The RFs and clinicopathological data of 175 patients (125 in the training set and 50 in the validation set) with clear cell RCC (ccRCC) were retrospectively analyzed. In the training set, RFs were extracted from multiphase enhanced CT tumor volume and selected using the stability LASSO feature selection algorithm. A radiomics nomogram final model was developed that incorporated the RFs weighted sum and selected clinical predictors based on the multivariate Cox proportional hazard regression. The performances of a clinical variables-only model, RFs-only model, and the final model were compared by receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analysis and DeLong test. Nomogram performance was determined and validated with respect to its discrimination, calibration, reclassification, and clinical usefulness.

The radiomics nomogram included age, clinical stage, KPS score, and RFs weighted sum, which consisted of 6 selected RFs. The final model showed good discrimination, with a C-index of 0.836 and 0.706 in training and validation, and good calibration. In the training set, the C-index of the final model was significantly larger than the clinical-only model (DeLong test, p = 0.008). From the clinical variables-only model to the final model, the reclassification of net reclassification improvement was 18.03%, and the integrated discrimination improvement was 19.08%. Decision curve analysis demonstrated the clinical usefulness of the radiomics nomogram.

The CT-based RF is an improvement factor for clinical variables-only model. The radiomics nomogram provides individualized risk assessment of postoperative PFS for patients with RCC.