Multi-window CT based Radiomic signatures in differentiating indolent versus aggressive lung cancers in the National Lung Screening Trial: a retrospective study

BACKGROUND: We retrospectively evaluated the capability of radiomic features to predict tumor growth in lung cancer screening and compared the performance of multi-window radiomic features and single window radiomic features. METHODS: One hundred fifty lung nodules among 114 screen-detected, incident lung cancer patients from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) were investigated. Volume double time (VDT) was calculated as the difference between continuous two scans and used to define indolent and aggressive lung cancers. Lung nodules were semi-automatically segmented using lung and mediastinal windows separately, and subtracting the mediastinal window region from the lung window region generated the difference region. 364 radiomic features were separately exacted from nodules using the lung window, the mediastinal window and the difference region. Multivariable models were conducted to identify the most predictive features in predicting tumor growth. Clinical information was also obtained from the database. RESULTS: Based on our definition, 26% of the cases were indolent lung cancer. The tumor growth pattern could be predicted by radiomic models constructed using features obtained in the lung window, the difference region, and by combining features obtained in both the lung window and difference regions with areas under the receiver operator characteristic (AUROCs) of 0.799, 0.819, and 0.846, respectively. The multi-window feature model showed better performance compared to single window features (P < 0.001). Incorporating clinical factors into the multi-window feature models showed improvement, yielding an accuracy of 84.67% and AUROC of 0.855 for distinguishing indolent from aggressive disease. CONCLUSIONS: Multi-window CT based radiomics features are valuable predictors of indolent lung cancers and out performed single CT window setting. Combining clinical information improved predicting performance. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s40644-019-0232-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.