Distinguishing pure histopathological growth patterns of colorectal liver metastases on CT using deep learning and radiomics

Distinguishing pure histopathological growth patterns of colorectal liver metastases on CT using deep learning and radiomics: a pilot study

Starmans, Martijn P.A. (Erasmus MC)
Buisman, Florian E. (Erasmus MC)
Renckens, Michel (Erasmus MC)
Willemssen, François E.J.A. (Erasmus MC)
van der Voort, Sebastian R. (Erasmus MC)
Groot Koerkamp, B. (Erasmus MC)
Grünhagen, Dirk J. (Erasmus MC)
Niessen, W.J. (TU Delft ImPhys/Medical Imaging; TU Delft ImPhys/Computational Imaging; Erasmus MC)
Vermeulen, Peter B. (Universiteit Antwerpen)

2021

Histopathological growth patterns (HGPs) are independent prognosticators for colorectal liver metastases (CRLM). Currently, HGPs are determined postoperatively. In this study, we evaluated radiomics for preoperative prediction of HGPs on computed tomography (CT), and its robustness to segmentation and acquisition variations. Patients with pure HGPs [i.e. 100% desmoplastic (dHGP) or 100% replacement (rHGP)] and a CT-scan who were surgically treated at the Erasmus MC between 2003–2015 were included retrospectively. Each lesion was segmented by three clinicians and a convolutional neural network (CNN). A prediction model was created using 564 radiomics features and a combination of machine learning approaches by training on the clinician’s and testing on the unseen CNN segmentations. The intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to select features robust to segmentation variations; ComBat was used to harmonize for acquisition variations. Evaluation was performed through a 100 × random-split cross-validation. The study included 93 CRLM in 76 patients (48% dHGP; 52% rHGP). Despite substantial differences between the segmentations of the three clinicians and the CNN, the radiomics model had a mean area under the curve of 0.69. ICC-based feature selection or ComBat yielded no improvement. Concluding, the combination of a CNN for segmentation and radiomics for classification has potential for automatically distinguishing dHGPs from rHGP, and is robust to segmentation and acquisition variations. Pending further optimization, including extension to mixed HGPs, our model may serve as a preoperative addition to postoperative HGP assessment, enabling further exploitation of HGPs as a biomarker.

Biomarkers
Computed
Deep learning
Liver neoplasms
Machine learning
Tomography
X-ray

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:3a3b30a5-4e6e-4452-8b77-d26435321f74

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10585-021-10119-6

0262-0898

Clinical and Experimental Metastasis, 38 (5), 483-494

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2021 Martijn P.A. Starmans, Florian E. Buisman, Michel Renckens, François E.J.A. Willemssen, Sebastian R. van der Voort, B. Groot Koerkamp, Dirk J. Grünhagen, W.J. Niessen, Peter B. Vermeulen, More Authors