AbstractTumor spread through air spaces (STAS) in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is known to influence a poor patient outcome, even in patients presenting with early-stage disease. However, the pre-operative diagnosis of STAS remains challenging. With the progress of radiomics-based analyses several attempts have been made to predict STAS based on radiological findings. In the present study, patients with NSCLC which is located peripherally and tumors ≤ 2 cm in size on computed tomography (CT) that were potential candidates for sublobar resection were enrolled in this study. The radiologic features of the targeted tumors on thin-section CT were extracted using the PyRadiomics v3.0 software package, and a predictive model for STAS was built using the t-test and XGBoost. Thirty-five out of 226 patients had a STAS histology. The predictive model of STAS indicated an area under the receiver-operator characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.77. There was no significant difference in the overall survival (OS) for lobectomy between the predicted-STAS (+) and (−) groups (p = 0.19), but an unfavorable OS for sublobar resection was indicated in the predicted-STAS (+) group (p < 0.01). These results suggest that radiomics with machine-learning helped to develop a favorable model of STAS (+) NSCLC, which might be useful for the proper selection of candidates who should undergo sublobar resection.
Correction to “A model for soil relative hydraulic conductivity based on the water retention characteristic curve”