Evaluating complete response prediction rates in locally advanced rectal cancer with different radiomics segmentation approaches

Studies examining prediction of complete response (CR) in locally advanced rectum cancer (LARC) from pre/post chemoradiotherapy (CRT) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are performed mostly with segmentations of the tumor, whereas only in two studies segmentation included tumor and mesorectum. Additionally, pelvic extramesorectal region, which is included in the clinical target volume (CTV) of radiotherapy, may contain information. Therefore, we aimed to compare predictive rates of radiomics analysis with features extracted from segmentations of tumor, tumor+mesorectum, and CTV.Ninety-three LARC patients who underwent CRT in our institution between 2012 and 2019 were retrospectively scanned. Patients were divided into CR and non-CR groups. Tumor, tumor+mesorectum and CTV were segmented on T2 preCRT MRI images. Extracted features were compared for best area under the curve (AUC) of CR prediction with 15 machine-learning models.CR was observed in 25 patients (26.8%), of whom 13 had pathological, and 12 had clinical complete response. For tumor, tumor+mesorectum and CTV segmentations, the best AUC were 0.84, 0.81, 0.77 in the training set and 0.85, 0.83 and 0.72 in the test set, respectively; sensitivity and specificity for the test set were 76%, 90%, 76% and 71%, 67% and 62%, respectively.Although the highest AUC result is obtained from the tumor segmentation, the highest accuracy and sensitivity are detected with tumor+mesorectum segmentation and these findings align with previous studies, suggesting that the mesorectum contains valuable insights for CR. The lowest result is obtained with CTV segmentation. More studies with mesorectum and pelvic nodal regions included in segmentation are needed.