Assessment of a Radiomic Signature Developed in a General NSCLC Cohort for Predicting Overall Survival of ALK-Positive Patients With Different Treatment Types

The purpose of the study was to investigate the potential of a radiomic signature developed in a general non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cohort for predicting the overall survival of anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive (ALK+) patients with different treatment types. After test-retest in the Reference Image Database to Evaluate Therapy Response data set, 132 features (intraclass correlation coefficient > 0.9) were selected in the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator Cox regression model with a leave-one-out cross-validation. The NSCLC radiomics collection from The Cancer Imaging Archive was randomly divided into a training set (n = 254) and a validation set (n = 63) to develop a general radiomic signature for NSCLC. In our ALK+ set, 35 patients received targeted therapy and 19 patients received nontargeted therapy. The developed signature was tested later in this ALK+ set. Performance of the signature was evaluated with the concordance index (C-index) and stratification analysis. The general signature had good performance (C-index > 0.6; log rank P < .05) in the NSCLC radiomics collection. It includes 5 features: Geom_va_ratio, W_GLCM_Std, W_GLCM_DV, W_GLCM_IM2, and W_his_mean. Its accuracy of predicting overall survival in the ALK+ set achieved 0.649 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.640-0.658). Nonetheless, impaired performance was observed in the targeted therapy group (C-index = 0.573; 95% CI, 0.556-0.589) whereas significantly improved performance was observed in the nontargeted therapy group (C-index = 0.832; 95% CI, 0.832-0.852). Stratification analysis also showed that the general signature could only identify high- and low-risk patients in the nontargeted therapy group (log rank P = .00028). This preliminary study suggests that the applicability of a general signature to ALK+ patients is limited. The general radiomic signature seems to be only applicable to ALK+ patients who had received nontargeted therapy, which indicates that developing special radiomics signatures for patients treated with tyrosine kinase inhibitors might be necessary. Anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive (ALK+) patients exhibit unique clinical characteristics. It would be beneficial to effectively predict their treatment outcome. We assessed the performance of the radiomic signature from non–small-cell lung cancer for predicting ALK+ patient outcomes using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator Cox regression model. Its performance was impa