Discrimination of pancreatic serous cystadenomas from mucinous cystadenomas with CT textural features: Based on machine learning

Abstract

Objectives: This study was designed to estimate the performance of textural features derived from contrast-enhanced CT in the differential diagnosis of pancreatic serous cystadenomas and pancreatic mucinous cystadenomas. Methods: Fifty-three patients with pancreatic serous cystadenoma and 25 patients with pancreatic mucinous cystadenoma were included. Textural parameters of the pancreatic neoplasms were extracted using the LIFEx software, and were analyzed using random forest and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) methods. Patients were randomly divided into training and validation sets with a ratio of 4:1; random forest method was adopted to constructed a diagnostic prediction model. Scoring metrics included sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and AUC. Results: Radiomics features extracted from contrast-enhanced CT were able to discriminate pancreatic mucinous cystadenomas from serous cystadenomas in both the training group (slice thickness of 2 mm, AUC 0.77, sensitivity 0.95, specificity 0.83, accuracy 0.85; slice thickness of 5 mm, AUC 0.72, sensitivity 0.90, specificity 0.84, accuracy 0.86) and the validation group (slice thickness of 2 mm, AUC 0.66, sensitivity 0.86, specificity 0.71, accuracy 0.74; slice thickness of 5 mm, AUC 0.75, sensitivity 0.85, specificity 0.83, accuracy 0.83). Conclusions: In conclusion, our study provided preliminary evidence that textural features derived from CT images were useful in differential diagnosis of pancreatic mucinous cystadenomas and serous cystadenomas, which may provide a non-invasive approach to determine whether surgery is needed in clinical practice. However, multicentre studies with larger sample size are needed to confirm these results.