Establish a New Diagnosis of Sarcopenia Based on Extracted Radiomic Features to Predict Prognosis of Patients With Gastric Cancer

BACKGROUND: Preoperative sarcopenia is a prognostic risk factor for gastric cancer (GC). This study aimed to determine whether radiomic sarcopenia features on computed tomography (CT) could be used to diagnose sarcopenia preoperatively, and whether they could be used to accurately predict the postoperative survival and complication prognosis of patients with GC. METHODS: We retrospectively analyzed data of 550 patients with GC who underwent radical gastrectomy. The patients were divided into training (2014–2016) and validation (2017–2019) cohorts. We established a radiomics-based diagnosis tool for sarcopenia. Thereafter, univariate and multivariate analyses of diagnostic factors were carried out. Receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves and area under the curve (AUC) were used to compare different diagnostic models. The Kaplan–Meier method was used to estimate the survival curve. RESULTS: Radiomic sarcopenia correlated with complications and long-term survival. Skeletal muscle index, grip strength, and walking speed were correlated with postoperative complications in both cohorts (AUCs: 0.632, 0.577, and 0.614, respectively in the training cohort; 0.570, 0.605, 0.546, respectively, in the validation cohort), and original sarcopenia was more accurate than any of these indicators. However, radiomic sarcopenia has a higher AUC in predicting short-term complications than original sarcopenia in both groups (AUCs: 0.646 vs. 0.635 in the training cohort; 0.641 vs. 0.625 in the validation cohort). In the training cohort, the overall survival time of patients with original sarcopenia was shorter than normal patients (hazard ratio, HR = 1.741; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.044–2.903; p = 0.031). While radiomic sarcopenia had a greater prognostic significance, the overall survival time of patients with radiomic sarcopenia was significantly worse than normal patients (HR, 1.880; 95% CI, 1.225–2.885, p = 0.003). CONCLUSION: Extracted sarcopenia features based on CT can predict long-term survival and short-term complications of GC patients after surgery, and its accuracy has been verified by training and validation groups. Compared with original sarcopenia, radiomic sarcopenia can effectively improve the accuracy of survival and complication prediction and also shorten the time and steps of traditional screening, thereby reducing the subjectivity effects of sarcopenia assessment.