Radiomics Analysis of Contrast-Enhanced CT for Hepatocellular Carcinoma Grading

OBJECTIVES: To investigate the value of contrast-enhanced computer tomography (CT)-based on radiomics in discriminating high-grade and low-grade hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) before surgery. METHODS: The retrospective study including 161 consecutive subjects with HCC which was approved by the institutional review board, and the patients were divided into a training group (n = 112) and test group (n = 49) from January 2013 to January 2018. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) was used to select the most valuable features to build a support vector machine (SVM) model. The performance of the predictive model was evaluated using the area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. RESULTS: The SVM model showed an acceptable ability to differentiate high-grade from low-grade HCC, with an AUC of 0.904 in the training dataset and 0.937 in the test dataset, accuracy (92.2% versus 95.7%), sensitivity(82.5% versus 88.0%), and specificity (92.7% versus 95.8%), respectively. CONCLUSION: The machine learning-based radiomics reflects a better evaluating performance in differentiating HCC between low-grade and high-grade, which may contribute to personalized treatment.