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Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound Radiomics for Hepatocellular Carcinoma Recurrence Prediction After Thermal Ablation

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Abstract

Purpose

To develop a radiomics model based on dynamic contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) to predict early and late recurrence in patients with a single HCC lesion ≤ 5 cm in diameter after thermal ablation.

Procedures

We enrolled patients who underwent thermal ablation for HCC in our hospital from April 2004 to April 2017. Radiomics based on two branch convolution recurrent network was utilized to analyze preoperative dynamic CEUS image of HCC lesions to establish CEUS model, in comparison to the conventional ultrasound (US), clinical, and combined models. Clinical follow-up of HCC recurrence after ablation were taken as reference standard to evaluate the predicted performance of CEUS model and other models.

Results

We finally analyzed 318 patients (training cohort: test cohort = 255:63). The combined model showed better performance for early recurrence than CUES (in training cohort, AUC, 0.89 vs. 0.84, P < 0.001; in test cohort, AUC, 0.84 vs. 0.83, P = 0.272), US (P < 0.001), or clinical model (P < 0.001). For late recurrence prediction, the combined model showed the best performance than the CEUS (C-index, in training cohort, 0.77 vs. 0.76, P = 0.009; in test cohort, 0.77 vs. 0.68, P < 0.001), US (P < 0.001), or clinical model (P < 0.001).

Conclusions

The CEUS model based on dynamic CEUS radiomics performed well in predicting early HCC recurrence after ablation. The combined model combining CEUS, US radiomics, and clinical factors could stratify the high risk of late recurrence.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No. 2017YFC0112000, National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81827802), the Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangzhou, China under Grant No. 201704020164 and Chinese Academy of Sciences (KFJ-STS-ZDTP-059 and YJKYYQ20180048).

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Author notes

  1. Qiu-Ping Ma and Xue-lei He contributed equally to this article and should be considered co-first authors.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ultrasound, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Liver Disease Research, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510630, Guangdong Province, People’s Republic of China

    Qiu-Ping Ma, Kai Li, Jin-fen Wang, Qing-Jing Zeng, Er-Jiao Xu, Xu-qi He & Rong-Qin Zheng

  2. Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No.95 Zhongguancun East Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100190, People’s Republic of China

    Xue-lei He, Wang Kun & Jei Tian

  3. School of Information Sciences and Technology, Northwest University, Xi’an, 710127, Shaanxi Province, People’s Republic of China

    Xue-lei He

  4. Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, 2522, Australia

    Shuo-yang Li

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  1. Qiu-Ping Ma
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Correspondence to Wang Kun, Rong-Qin Zheng or Jei Tian.

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Ma, QP., He, Xl., Li, K. et al. Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound Radiomics for Hepatocellular Carcinoma Recurrence Prediction After Thermal Ablation. Mol Imaging Biol 23, 572–585 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11307-021-01578-0

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