Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 5, 2026
High-frequency Ultrasound Imaging of Mouse Cervical Lymph Nodes
Published on: July 25, 2015
A Multimodal Ultrasound Radiomics Model Integrating Contrast-Enhanced Phases: Retrospective Temporal Test Cohort
Mingru Gao1, Qian Lv1, Haohao Hao1
1Department of Ultrasound, The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150001, Heilongjiang, China (M.G., Q.L., H.H., N.Z., Y.G., K.M.).
Rationale And Objectives:
To develop a multimodal ultrasound radiomics model based on conventional ultrasound and three-phase contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) for distinguishing benign from malignant cervical lymph nodes, and to evaluate its performance in a patient-level temporal test cohort against sonographers with different experience levels.
Materials And Methods:
This retrospective study included 245 patients in the development cohort (August 2022-December 2024) and 60 subsequent patients in the temporal test cohort (January-December 2025). One target lymph node was analyzed per patient, and the two cohorts were strictly non-overlapping at the patient level. For each case, matched two-dimensional ultrasound (2D-US), color Doppler flow imaging (CDFI), and arterial-, parenchymal-, and clearance-phase CEUS key frames were collected. Deep features were extracted from manually cropped ROIs using a frozen pre-trained ResNet50. Feature selection, hyperparameter tuning, and decision-threshold locking were completed only within the development cohort; the temporal test cohort was used once for final reporting. Sonographers reviewed the same static key-frame image set in randomized order under blinded conditions.
Results:
The CEUS-integrated SVM model (Model 2-SVM) showed the best overall performance among the tested models. In the temporal test cohort, it achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.851 (95% CI: 0.762-0.940), sensitivity of 84.8% (95% CI: 69.1-93.3), specificity of 66.7% (95% CI: 47.8-81.4), accuracy of 76.7% (95% CI: 64.6-85.6), PPV of 75.7% (95% CI: 59.9-86.6), and NPV of 78.3% (95% CI: 58.1-90.3). The senior and junior sonographers achieved AUCs of 0.826 and 0.783, respectively. At the validation-locked threshold, the model showed numerically higher sensitivity than both sonographers but lower specificity than the senior sonographer. Threshold-free and paired statistical comparisons are reported in the corresponding tables.
Conclusion:
A multimodal ultrasound radiomics model incorporating CEUS key-frame information demonstrated feasible diagnostic performance in a retrospective temporal test cohort and may serve as a hypothesis-generating adjunct for cervical lymph node assessment. This retrospective single-center design, manual ROI delineation, and the absence of prospective external validation require further multi-center evaluation before clinical application.
