Differentiating Central Lung Tumors from Atelectasis with Contrast-Enhanced CT-Based Radiomics Features

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the utility of radiomics features in differentiating central lung cancers and atelectasis on contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) images. This study is retrospective. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In this study, 36 patients with central pulmonary cancer and atelectasis between July 2013 and June 2018 were identified. A total of 1,653 2D and 2,327 3D radiomics features were extracted from segmented lung cancers and atelectasis on contrast-enhanced CT. The refined features were investigated for usefulness in classifying lung cancer and atelectasis according to the information gain, and 10 models were trained based on these features. The classification model is trained and tested at the region level and pixel level, respectively. RESULTS: Among all the extracted features, 334 2D features and 1,507 3D features had an information gain (IG) greater than 0.1. The highest accuracy (AC) of the region classifiers was 0.9375. The best Dice score, Hausdorff distance, and voxel AC were 0.2076, 45.28, and 0.8675, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Radiomics features derived from contrast-enhanced CT images can differentiate lung cancers and atelectasis at the regional and voxel levels.