An Intelligent Clinical Decision Support System for Preoperative Prediction of Lymph Node Metastasis in Gastric Cancer

The aim of this study was to develop and validate a computational clinical decision support system (DSS) on the basis of CT radiomics features for the prediction of lymph node (LN) metastasis in gastric cancer (GC) using machine learning–based analysis. Clinicopathologic and CT imaging data were retrospectively collected from 490 patients who were diagnosed with GC between January 2002 and December 2016. Radiomics features were extracted from venous-phase CT images. Relevant features were selected, ranked, and modeled using a support vector machine classifier in 326 training and validation data sets. A model test was performed independently in a test set (n = 164). Finally, a head-to-head comparison of the diagnostic performance of the DSS and that of the conventional staging criterion was performed. Two hundred ninety-seven of the 490 patients examined had histopathologic evidence of LN metastasis, yielding a 60.6% metastatic rate. The area under the curve for predicting LN+ was 0.824 (95% confidence interval, 0.804-0.847) for the DSS in the training and validation data and 0.764 (95% confidence interval, 0.699-0.833) in the test data. The calibration plots showed good concordance between the predicted and observed probability of LN+ using the DSS approach. The DSS was better able to predict LN metastasis than the conventional staging criterion in the training and validation data (accuracy 76.4% versus 63.5%) and in the test data (accuracy 71.3% versus 63.2%) A DSS based on 13 “worrisome” radiomics features appears to be a promising tool for the preoperative prediction of LN status in patients with GC.