Towards a survival risk prediction model for metastatic NSCLC patients on durvalumab using whole-lung CT radiomics

Background Existing criteria for predicting patient survival from immunotherapy are primarily centered on the PD-L1 status of patients. We tested the hypothesis that noninvasively captured baseline whole-lung radiomics features from CT images, baseline clinical parameters, combined with advanced machine learning approaches, can help to build models of patient survival that compare favorably with PD-L1 status for predicting ‘less-than-median-survival risk’ in the metastatic NSCLC setting for patients on durvalumab. With a total of 1062 patients, inclusive of model training and validation, this is the largest such study yet. Methods To ensure a sufficient sample size, we combined data from treatment arms of three metastatic NSCLC studies. About 80% of this data was used for model training, and the remainder was held-out for validation. We first trained two independent models; Model-C trained to predict survival using clinical data; and Model-R trained to predict survival using whole-lung radiomics features. Finally, we created Model-C+R which leveraged both clinical and radiomics features. Results The classification accuracy (for median survival) of Model-C, Model-R, and Model-C+R was 63%, 55%, and 68% respectively. Sensitivity analysis of survival prediction across different training and validation cohorts showed concordance indices ([95 percentile]) of 0.64 ([0.63, 0.65]), 0.60 ([0.59, 0.60]), and 0.66 ([0.65,0.67]), respectively. We additionally evaluated generalization of these models on a comparable cohort of 144 patients from an independent study, demonstrating classification accuracies of 65%, 62%, and 72% respectively. Conclusion Machine Learning models combining baseline whole-lung CT radiomic and clinical features may be a useful tool for patient selection in immunotherapy. Further validation through prospective studies is needed.