Development and Validation a Nomogram for Predicting the Third Station Lymph Node Metastasis in Early Gastric Cancer
Abstract Background:This study aimed to evaluate the value of radiomic nomogram in predicting lymph node metastasis in T1-2 gastric cancer according to the No. 3 station lymph nodes.Methods:A total of 159 T1-2 gastric cancer (GC) patients who had undergone surgery with lymphadenectomy between March 2012 and November 2017 were retrospectively collected and divided into a primary cohort (n = 80) and a validation cohort (n = 79). Radiomic features were extracted from both tumor region and No. 3 station lymph nodes (LN) based on computed tomography (CT) images per patient. Then, key features were selected using minimum redundancy maximum relevance algorithm and fed into two radiomic signatures, respectively. Meanwhile, the predictive performance of clinical risk factors was studied. Finally, a nomogram was built by merging radiomic signatures and clinical risk factors and evaluated by the area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUC) as well as decision curve.Results: Two radiomic signatures, reflecting phenotypes of the tumor and LN respectively, were significantly associated with LN metastasis. A nomogram incorporating two radiomic signatures and CT-reported LN metastasis status showed good discrimination of LN metastasis in both the primary cohort (AUC: 0.915; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.832-0.998) and validation cohort (AUC: 0.908; 95%CI: 0.814-1.000). The decision curve also indicated its potential clinical usefulness.Conclusions:The nomogram received favorable predictive accuracy in predicting No.3 station LN metastasis in T1-2 GC, and could assist the choice of therapy.