Comparison between Three Radiomics Models and Clinical Nomograms for Prediction of Lymph Node Involvement in PCa Patients Combining Clinical and Radiomic Features

PURPOSE: We aim to compare the performance of three different radiomics models (logistic regression (LR), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM) ) and clinical nomograms (Briganti, MSKCC, Yale, and Roach) for predicting lymph node involvement (LNI) in prostate cancer (PCa) patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The retrospective study includes 95 patients who underwent mp-MRI and radical prostatectomy for PCa with pelvic lymphadenectomy. Imaging data (intensity in T2, DWI, ADC, and PIRADS), clinical data (age and pre-MRI PSA), histological data (Gleason score, TNM staging, histological type, capsule invasion, seminal vesicle invasion, and neurovascular bundle involvement), and clinical nomograms (Yale, Roach, MSKCC, and Briganti) were collected for each patient. Manual segmentation of the index lesions was performed for each patient using an open-source program (3D SLICER). Radiomic features were extracted for each segmentation using the Pyradiomics library for each sequence (T2, DWI, and ADC). The features were then selected and used to train and test three different radiomics models (LR, RF, and SVM) independently using ChatGPT software (v 4o). The coefficient value of each feature was calculated (significant value for coefficient ≥ ±0. 5). The predictive performance of the radiomics models and clinical nomograms was assessed using accuracy and area under the curve (AUC) (significant value for p ≤ 0. 05). Thus, the diagnostic accuracy between the radiomics and clinical models were compared. RESULTS: This study identified 343 features per patient (330 radiomics features and 13 clinical features). The most significant features were T2ₙodulofirstordervariance and T2ₙodulofirstorderkurtosis. The highest predictive performance was achieved by the RF model with DWI (accuracy 86%, AUC 0. 89) and ADC (accuracy 89%, AUC 0. 67). Clinical nomograms demonstrated satisfactory but lower predictive performance compared to the RF model in the DWI sequences. CONCLUSIONS: Among the prediction models developed using integrated data (radiomics and semantics), RF shows slightly higher diagnostic accuracy in terms of AUC compared to clinical nomograms in PCa lymph node involvement prediction.