Whole-Lesion CT Texture Analysis as a Quantitative Biomarker for the Identification of Homogeneous Renal Tumors

Renal tumors are very common in the urinary system, and the preoperative differential diagnosis of homogeneous renal tumors remains a challenge. This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of the whole-lesion CT texture analysis for the identification of homogeneous renal tumors including clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), chromophobe RCC (chRCC), and renal oncocytoma (RO). This retrospective study was approved by our local IRB. Contrast-enhanced CT examination was performed in 128 patients and histopathologically confirmed ccRCC, chRCC, and RO. The one-way ANOVA test with Bonferroni corrections was used to compare the differences, and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was applied to determine the diagnostic efficiency. The whole-lesion CT histogram analysis was used to demonstrate significant differences between ccRCC and chRCC in both arterial and venous phases, and the entropy demonstrated excellent performance in discriminating these two types of tumors (AUCs = 0.95, 0.91). The inhomogeneity of ccRCC was significantly higher than that of RO both in arterial and venous phases. The entropy of chRCC was significantly lower than that of RO, and the kurtosis and entropy yielded high sensitivity (91%) and moderate specificity (74%) in the arterial phase. The whole-lesion CT histogram analysis could be useful for the differential diagnosis of homogeneous ccRCC, chRCC, and RO.