Differential diagnosis of gallbladder neoplastic polyps and cholesterol polyps with radiomics of dual modal ultrasound: a pilot study

To verify whether radiomics techniques based on dual-modality ultrasound consisting of B-mode and superb microvascular imaging (SMI) can improve the accuracy of the differentiation between gallbladder neoplastic polyps and cholesterol polyps.

A total of 100 patients with 100 pathologically proven gallbladder polypoid lesions were enrolled in this retrospective study. Radiomics features on B-mode ultrasound and SMI of each lesion were extracted. Support vector machine was used to classify adenomas and cholesterol polyps of gallbladder for B-mode, SMI and dual-modality ultrasound, respectively, and the classification results were compared among the three groups.

Six, eight and nine features were extracted for each lesion at B-mode ultrasound, SMI and dual-modality ultrasound, respectively. In dual-modality ultrasound model, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and Youden's index were 0.850 ± 0.090, 0.828 ± 0.097, 0.892 ± 0.144, 0.803 ± 0.149 and 0.695 ± 0.157, respectively. The AUC and Youden's index of the dual-modality model were higher than those of the B-mode model (p < 0.05). The AUC, accuracy, specificity and Youden's index of the dual-modality model were higher than those of the SMI model (p < 0.05).

Radiomics analysis of the dual-modality ultrasound composed of B-mode and SMI can improve the accuracy of classification between gallbladder neoplastic polyps and cholesterol polyps.