Prognostic Impact of the Findings on Thin-Section Computed Tomography in stage I lung adenocarcinoma with visceral pleural invasion

Visceral pleural invasion (VPI) in stageI lung adenocarcinoma is an independent negative prognostic factor. However, no studies proved any morphologic pattern could be referred to as a prognostic factor. Thus, we aim to investigate the potential prognostic impact of VPI by extracting high-dimensional radiomics features on thin-section computed tomography (CT). A total of 327 surgically resected pathological-N0M0 lung adenocarcinoma 3 cm or less in size were evaluated. Radiomics signature was generated by calculating the contribution weight of each feature and validated using repeated leaving-one-out ten-fold cross-validation approach. The accuracy of proposed radiomics signature for predicting VPI achieved 90.5% with ROC analysis (AUC, 0.938, sensitivity, 90.6%, specificity, 93.2%, PPV: 91.2, NPV: 92.8). The cut-off value allowed separation of patients in the validation data into high-risk and low-risk groups with an odds ratio 12.01. Radiomics signature showed a concordance index of 0.895 and AIC value of 88.9% with regression analysis. Among these radiomics features, percentile 10%, wavEnLL_S_2, S_0_1_SumAverage represented as independent factors for determining VPI. Results suggested that radiomics signature on CT exhibited as an independent prognostic factor in discriminating VPI in lung adenocarcinoma and could potentially help to discriminate the prognosis difference in stage I lung adenocarcinoma.