Assessing synchronous ovarian metastasis in gastric cancer patients using a clinical-radiomics nomogram based on baseline abdominal contrast-enhanced CT: a two-center study

BACKGROUND: To build and validate a radiomics nomogram based on preoperative CT scans and clinical data for detecting synchronous ovarian metastasis (SOM) in female gastric cancer (GC) cases. METHODS: Pathologically confirmed GC cases in 2 cohorts were retrospectively enrolled. All cases had presurgical abdominal contrast-enhanced CT and pelvis contrast-enhanced MRI and pathological examinations for any suspicious ovarian lesions detected by MRI. Cohort 1 cases (n = 101) were included as the training set. Radiomics features were obtained to develop a radscore. A nomogram combining the radscore and clinical factors was built to detect SOM. The bootstrap method was carried out in cohort 1 as internal validation. External validation was carried out in cohort 2 (n = 46). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis, decision curve analysis (DCA) and the confusion matrix were utilized to assess the performances of the radscore, nomogram and subjective evaluation model. RESULTS: The nomogram, which combined age and the radscore, displayed a higher AUC than the radscore and subjective evaluation (0.910 vs 0.827 vs 0.773) in the training cohort. In the external validation cohort, the nomogram also had a higher AUC than the radscore and subjective evaluation (0.850 vs 0.790 vs 0.675). DCA and the confusion matrix confirmed the nomogram was superior to the radscore in both cohorts. CONCLUSIONS: This pilot study showed that a nomogram model combining the radscore and clinical characteristics is useful in detecting SOM in female GC cases. It may be applied to improve clinical treatment and is superior to subjective evaluation or the radscore alone. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40644-023-00584-5.