MRI-based radiomics machine learning model to differentiate non-clear cell renal cell carcinoma from benign renal tumors

Purpose

We aim to develop an MRI-based radiomics model to improve the accuracy of differentiating non-ccRCC from benign renal tumors preoperatively.

Methods

The retrospective study included 195 patients with pathologically confirmed renal tumors (134 non-ccRCCs and 61 benign renal tumors) who underwent preoperative renal mass protocol MRI examinations. The patients were divided into a training set (n = 136) and test set (n = 59). Simple t-test and the Least Absolute Shrink and Selection Operator (LASSO) were used to select the most valuable features and the rad-scores of them were calculated. The clinicoradiologic models, single-sequence radiomics models, multi-sequence radiomics models and combined models for differentiation were constructed with 2 classifiers (support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR)) in the training set and used for differentiation in the test set. Ten-fold cross validation was applied to obtain the optimal hyperparameters of the models. The performances of the models were evaluated by the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). Delong’s test was performed to compare the performances of models.

Results

After univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis, the independent risk factors to differentiate non-ccRCC from benign renal tumors were selected as follows: age, tumor region, hemorrhage, pseudocapsule and enhancement degree. Among the 14 machine learning classification models constructed, the combined model with LR has the highest efficiency in differentiating non-ccRCC from benign renal tumors. The AUC in the training set is 0.964, and the accuracy is 0.919. The AUC in the test set is 0.936, and the accuracy is 0.864.

Conclusion

The MRI-based radiomics machine learning is feasible to differentiate non-ccRCC from benign renal tumors, which could improve the accuracy of clinical diagnosis.