Dielectric property measurements for the rapid differentiation of thoracic lymph nodes using XGBoost in patients with non-small cell lung cancer: a self-control clinical trial

One of the important criteria for thoracic surgeons in making surgical strategies is whether the thoracic lymph nodes (LNs) are metastatic. Frozen section (FS) is widely used as an intraoperative diagnostic method, which is time-consuming and expensive. The dielectric property, including permittivity and conductivity, varies with different tissues. The extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) is a powerful classifier and widely used. Thus, this study aims to develop the rapid differentiation method combining dielectric property and XGBoost, and assess its efficacy on the thoracic LNs in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). This was a single center self-control clinical trial with paraffin pathology section (PPS) results as gold diagnosis. The LNs from the pathologically diagnosed patients with NSCLC were recruited, which were measured by open-ended coaxial probe for the dielectric property within 1-4,000 MHz after removal from the patients and then were sent to perform FS and PPS diagnosis. The XGBoost combining with dielectric property was developed to differentiate malignant LNs from benign LNs. The classified efficacy was determined using the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve and area under the curve (AUC). A total of 204 LNs from 67 NSCLC patients were analyzed. The mean values of the two parameters differed significantly (P