Preoperative CT texture analysis of gastric cancer: correlations with postoperative TNM staging

To explore the role of computed tomography (CT) texture analysis in predicting pathologic stage of gastric cancers. Preoperative enhanced CT images of 153 patients (112 men, 41 women) with gastric cancers were reviewed retrospectively. Regions of interest (ROIs) were manually drawn along the margin of the lesion on the section where it appeared largest on the arterial and venous CT images, which yielded texture parameters, including mean, maximum frequency, mode, skewness, kurtosis, and entropy. Correlations between texture parameters and pathological stage were analysed with Spearman's correlation test. The diagnostic performance of CT texture parameters in differentiating different stages was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. Maximum frequency in the arterial phase and mean, maximum frequency, mode in the venous phase correlated positively with T stage, N stage, and overall stage (all p