CT-based radiomics signature to predict CD8+ tumor infiltrating lymphocytes in non-small-cell lung cancer
Yaxi Chen1, Ting Xu1, Changsi Jiang2
1The Second Clinical Medical College, Jinan University, Shenzhen, PR China.
Background:
An abundance of CD8+ tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in the center of solid tumors is a reliable predictive biomarker for patients eligible for immunotherapy.
Purpose:
To develop a computed tomography (CT)-based radiomics signature for a preoperative prediction of an abundance of CD8+ TILs in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
Material And Methods:
In this retrospective study, 117 consecutive patients with pathologically confirmed NSCLC were included and randomly divided into training (n = 77) and test sets (n = 40). A total of 107 radiomics features were extracted from the three-dimensional volumes of interest of each patient. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression was used to select the strongest features for abundance of CD8+ TILs in NSCLC, and the radiomics score was constructed through a linear combination of these selected features. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was used to evaluate the predictive performance of the radiomics score.
Results:
The radiomics score was associated with an abundance of CD8+ TILs in NSCLC, which achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.83 (95% CI=0.73-0.92) and 0.68 (95% CI=0.54-0.87) in the training and test sets, respectively. The difference was not statistically significant (P = 0.20). The tumors with high CD8+ TILs tended to have heterogeneous dependences (high value of Dependence Non-Uniformity Normalized) and complicated texture (high value of Informational Measure of Correlation 1).
Conclusion:
CT-based radiomics features have the ability to predict CD8+ TILs expression levels of an abundance of CD8+ TILs in NSCLC, which was shown to be a potential imaging biomarker for stratifying patients who may benefit from immunotherapy.
