Prognostic Value of [(18)F]FDG PET Radiomics to Detect Peritoneal and Distant Metastases in Locally Advanced Gastric Cancer—A Side Study of the Prospective Multicentre PLASTIC Study

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Patients with locally advanced gastric cancer have a five-year survival rate of 36–45% after curatively intended D2-gastrectomy combined with perioperative chemotherapy. This relatively poor survival is mainly due to recurrence of the disease. The aim of this study was to improve detection of peritoneal and distant metastases on [(18)F]FDG-PET images in patients with advanced gastric cancer using radiomics. Radiomics consists of the extraction of large amounts of quantitative features from medical imaging and the subsequent mining of this dataset for potential information to monitor disease characteristics in clinical practice. Three classification models were developed to determine the added value of radiomics: a model with clinical variables only, a model with radiomic features only, and a clinicoradiomic model, combining clinical variables and radiomic features. [(18)F]FDG-PET-based radiomics showed no additional value in predicting peritoneal and distant metastases in locally advanced gastric cancer patients. ABSTRACT: Aim: To improve identification of peritoneal and distant metastases in locally advanced gastric cancer using [(18)F]FDG-PET radiomics. Methods: [(18)F]FDG-PET scans of 206 patients acquired in 16 different Dutch hospitals in the prospective multicentre PLASTIC-study were analysed. Tumours were delineated and 105 radiomic features were extracted. Three classification models were developed to identify peritoneal and distant metastases (incidence: 21%): a model with clinical variables, a model with radiomic features, and a clinicoradiomic model, combining clinical variables and radiomic features. A least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression classifier was trained and evaluated in a 100-times repeated random split, stratified for the presence of peritoneal and distant metastases. To exclude features with high mutual correlations, redundancy filtering of the Pearson correlation matrix was performed (r = 0.9). Model performances were expressed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). In addition, subgroup analyses based on Lauren classification were performed. Results: None of the models could identify metastases with low AUCs of 0.59, 0.51, and 0.56, for the clinical, radiomic, and clinicoradiomic model, respectively. Subgroup analysis of intestinal and mixed-type tumours resulted in low AUCs of 0.67 and 0.60 for the clinical and radiomic models, and a moderate AUC of 0.71 in the clinicoradiomic model. Subgroup analysis of diffuse-type tumours did not improve the classification performance. Conclusion: Overall, [(18)F]FDG-PET-based radiomics did not contribute to the preoperative identification of peritoneal and distant metastases in patients with locally advanced gastric carcinoma. In intestinal and mixed-type tumours, the classification performance of the clinical model slightly improved with the addition of radiomic features, but this slight improvement does not outweigh the laborious radiomic analysis.