The CT-based intratumoral and peritumoral machine learning radiomics analysis in predicting lymph node metastasis in rectal carcinoma

BACKGROUND: To construct clinical and machine learning nomogram for predicting the lymph node metastasis (LNM) status of rectal carcinoma (RC) based on radiomics and clinical characteristics. METHODS: 788 RC patients were enrolled from January 2015 to January 2021, including 303 RCs with LNM and 485 RCs without LNM. The radiomics features were calculated and selected with the methods of variance, correlation analysis, and gradient boosting decision tree. After feature selection, the machine learning algorithms of Bayes, k-nearest neighbor (KNN), logistic regression (LR), support vector machine (SVM), and decision tree (DT) were used to construct prediction models. The clinical characteristics combined with intratumoral and peritumoral radiomics was taken to develop a radiomics and machine learning nomogram. The relative standard deviation (RSD) was used to predict the stability of machine learning algorithms. The area under curves (AUCs) with 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated to evaluate the predictive efficacy of all models. RESULTS: To intratumoral radiomics analysis, the RSD of Bayes was minimal compared with other four machine learning algorithms. The AUCs of arterial-phase based intratumoral Bayes model (0.626 and 0.627) were higher than these of unenhanced-phase and venous-phase ones in both the training and validation group.The AUCs of intratumoral and peritumoral Bayes model were 0.656 in the training group and were 0.638 in the validation group, and the relevant Bayes-score was quantified. The clinical-Bayes nomogram containing significant clinical variables of diameter, PNI, EMVI, CEA, and CA19-9, and Bayes-score was constructed. The AUC (95%CI), specificity, and sensitivity of this nomogram was 0.828 (95%CI, 0.800-0.854), 74.85%, and 77.23%. CONCLUSION: Intratumoral and peritumoral radiomics can help predict the LNM status of RCs. The machine learning algorithm of Bayes in arterial-phase conducted better in consideration of terms of RSD and AUC. The clinical-Bayes nomogram achieved a better performance in predicting the LNM status of RCs. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12876-022-02525-1.