Predicting CD27 expression and clinical prognosis in serous ovarian cancer using CT-based radiomics

This study aimed to develop and evaluate radiomics models to predict CD27 expression and clinical prognosis before surgery in patients with serous ovarian cancer (SOC).

We used transcriptome sequencing data and contrast-enhanced computed tomography images of patients with SOC from The Cancer Genome Atlas (n = 339) and The Cancer Imaging Archive (n = 57) and evaluated the clinical significance and prognostic value of CD27 expression. Radiomics features were selected to create a recursive feature elimination-logistic regression (RFE-LR) model and a least absolute shrinkage and selection operator logistic regression (LASSO-LR) model for CD27 expression prediction.

CD27 expression was upregulated in tumor samples, and a high expression level was determined to be an independent protective factor for survival. A set of three and six radiomics features were extracted to develop RFE-LR and LASSO-LR radiomics models, respectively. Both models demonstrated good calibration and clinical benefits, as determined by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, calibration curves, and decision curve analysis. The LASSO-LR model performed better than the RFE-LR model, owing to the area under the curve (AUC) values of the ROC curves (0.829 vs. 0.736). Furthermore, the AUC value of the radiomics score that predicted the overall survival of patients with SOC diagnosed after 60 months was 0.788 using the LASSO-LR model.

The radiomics models we developed are promising noninvasive tools for predicting CD27 expression status and SOC prognosis. The LASSO-LR model is highly recommended for evaluating the preoperative risk stratification for SOCs in clinical applications.